By Chitra Gopalakrishnan

(Review: Gopal Lahiri, Selected Poems, published by Classix, an imprint of Hawakal, August 2025, New Delhi.)

Gopal Lahiri, Selected Poems, published by Classix, an imprint of New Delhi-based Hawakal, August 2025, is a handpicked selection of Lahiri’s 117 poems, carefully chosen by Sanjeev Sethi, an award-winning poet himself who has authored eight books and has his poems published in thirty-five countries. This collection has been curated from poems written by Lahiri over fifteen years and picked from Silent Steps (2010), Living Inside (2013), Tidal Interlude (2015), Return to Solitude: haiku and other short poems (2018), Alleys are filled with Future Alphabets (2021), Some Resonance, Some Desire (2022), Crossing the Shoreline (2022), and Anemone Morning and other poems (2024).

In these postnormal times, where complexity and contradictions are rife, where new crises materialise daily and where old certainties are fading but new certainties have yet to emerge, Gopal Lahiri’s poems offer a new and versatile architectural perspective for navigating this irresolute landscape world over.

Over time, Lahiri has intuitively worked towards a distinct form of poetry that uses a minimal structure to evoke both the familiar and the unfamiliar worlds in a single breath and within a single poem. In his cosmos, the mineral materiality of the real world exists with the amorphous abstraction of the inner world. As an abstract surrealist, he has built his encounters with this form to make subtle and sensitive delineations between these two worlds and to penetrate their equivocations and enigmas. His flair and panache with words, which he uses with utmost care, weighing every word for its exact and evocative meaning, and thae fact that he is bilingual have made such accomplishments—his bringing the unconscious to the conscious— possible.

The poems in this volume are a scrupulous selection of what his seasoned readers would call ‘classic’ Gopal Lahiri poems. They often resemble polylogues, in which they engage in dynamic conversations with multiple, competing perspectives, allowing images to tumble one upon the other across geographic terrains—Chandrabhaga River, Forsyth Park, Kashmir Valley, Kolkata, Lodi Gardens, Manipur, and Arthur Lake, among others. Often, nature is at the centre of attention; at other times, it is galactic presences; and sometimes mundane objects: pens, trams, boats, silk saris, wooden doors, marbles, lollipops, cigarettes, roads, windows, wheelchairs, guitars, pianos, and streetlights take centre stage. Yet all thoughts, emotions, nature, objects, flavours, smells, odours and decay are celebrated with equal measure, in all their irregular, uncomfortable, painful, imperfect jumble and with all their history, myths and current day realities.

But beyond the illusion of these wonderfully tangible dimensions and tangled images of pain and loss, and away from the symbolic and semiotic, Lahiri uncovers the actual, non-representational matrix of life, infinite spaces within the human consciousness—its luminosity, intangibility, its singular truth and far-from-conscious rhythms—fighting to do so even when ‘words vanish like Houdini’. This scouring is due to his being a geologist.

As this space within is indeterminate and elusive, impossible to pin down with concrete details, and can be grasped at only fleetingly, the poet, with the patience and precision of a pointillist, uses the surface of his poems to gradually cover up the gritty textures of the natural images and bring the abstract to the surface.

He allows its mystifying yet essential truths, without legible referents within the human mind, to emerge gently. But in a quixotic twist, that is typical of his renderings, he also lets them dissolve, almost as quickly as they appear, and slip away maddeningly, forcing the seeker to seek yet again, as he does so himself repeatedly, endlessly. And then comes the accompanying thought, almost shyly—the glimmering notion, a reminder as it were—that nothing is truly lost and things we believe we have no control over are only things we truly possess. This is the liberation, the celebration, the lyrical mysticism that lies at the emotional core of his poems.

Sojourning into the unknown

The opening poem in this collection, ‘Crossing the Shoreline,’ exemplifies Lahiri’s crossing of literal and figurative boundaries. These two destinations—the physical and individual consciousness—may seem divergent to the uninitiated, but to minds freed by imagination, they could serve as bridges.

unknown alphabets draw humpbacked sand dunes
aligned in endless rows on the shore
of my sleep.

The mineral landscape draws each undulation
of my own breathing,
every location is in walking distance.

Go and receive the self.

In ‘Soul Music’, too, the travelling to the sacred is somewhat akin.

The voice of the trees is like any meanderings,
sinuous bends, loops, curves, turns,
and finally winding in the channel—
a simulacrum of soul music.

Strangeness, such as this, where there is the melding of two worlds, itself becomes a desire for sojourning, for searching, so new understandings emerge and transfigure minds, as the poem ‘Search’ highlights. Here, the body is a conduit to the mind and soul.

We reach the edge write seven syllables under the
eyelids
street lights shed their skin.

I continue the search,
ivy strangling in a fence the red ants seeking earth.

The evening sky repeats a smile that burns
and comes through unknown stars.

Voyages like this help navigate human desolation—the pain and loss of everyday existence —by bringing wholeness to one’s being. ‘The Wall of Silence’ is a reminder of how lacerating life is.

Stick to her side
bloated bellies, blank faces of children
sucking their thumbs.
Lives continue to be lived.

‘Fisherman Cove’ is another instance of brutal realities of this world of consequence.

Hunger we cannot see, we cannot hear,
the fishermen whisper.

Walk away from this moment
darkness has acquired its deepest hues.

‘Chandrabhaga’ reverberates with the thought that travels of this nature are also needed for the oneness of the human race.

all our shadows drop anchor on shores.
I wait for the final resonance under another sky.

We need imagination now more than ever

A quest of into the core of one’s consciousness, is also necessary for imaginators of all kinds, the poet argues. It serves as the impetus behind their creations. A blank page for a poet is terror, for universal truths cannot be incarnated into paper-and-ink poems of wonder and wisdom. (‘My Poem’)

the lights and shadows of some other universe
weave lines and half-lines.

For the poem taking shape in this mothy room
I slide into the evening on the back of a dream.

In a world that reduces life to data, Lahiri is deeply invested in the role of imagination, in its ability to breathe meaning free of measurement and envision possibilities beyond the known and visible. Poem after poem shows how he views imagination not as an indulgence but as an urgent necessity as one crisis upon another befalls our world, be it climate change, poverty, violence against women, health maladies or distrust among countries. He views an artist almost as a shaman, where inspiration comes as a gift.

Against the bleak, black skies, crying lizards, a moon that denies its light and broken walls, ‘New World in the Waiting’ conjures up ‘future alphabets’ and envisages a world less demonic, one with compassion. Here, the poet takes on the mantle of a clairvoyant who casts a magical look into the future.

A certain beauty is waiting on the street
with something that cares, that cultivates

Imagination likewise shines brilliantly, almost like a miracle, in this haiku, in which the poet, like an enchanter, illuminates a world full of possibilities.

evening stars
ready to ink the beautiful nights
sipping secrets

Lahiri sees imagination—and thus poetry—as a way to reach an individual to his private, interior world, the real world, one that the visible world detracts from. It is for him both defiance and worship.

Finding the essence of the soul is punishing and blissful by turn

Yet this search for the unchanging core of life, is neither easy nor attainable at times. In ‘Orphan Smile’, the poet is bereft of inventiveness as he searches for creativity to no avail.

Each mirror reflects an orphan’s smile,
What remains is the rising smoke of the pyres.

In ‘Forever’, he is similarly debilitated.

I cannot place my beliefs into words,
Rise or fall of resistance
Feels wingless in stormy winds.

Inversely, in ‘Biography’, lines and truths arrive, without warning, without anticipation, against the backdrop of piano strains, and,

play core repertoire
of solemnities,

lazy idioms now write
on your biography.

In ‘Crossing’, the poet is faced with a knotty juxtaposition: even as the poet’s words begin to lose ‘to another alphabet, another syllable’, a ‘quiet raga builds in the chaos’.

It is this intriguing peek-a-boo, the play of ‘now here’, ‘now gone’—with everything in life, with the totems of today, as also in the universe that awaits an existence within, where enlightenments that seem within grasp slip away—that is quintessential Lahiri.

A quiet, still light

But the poet does wave a white flag; he offers hope— a real possibility— to his readers. He holds out a wholeness of being, a quiet, lighted stillness, in this fragmented universe. It is possible for buried truths of the great unknown, from the beyond, to reveal themselves, he says. But for these truths to appear, like the vestiges of lost cities that have been erased from the soil’s surface, there is a need for forbearance and discipline, a stillness of mind and equipoise, and a certain letting-go.

‘Freedom‘ encompasses this thought.

Freedom is still an uneasy word.

Before the utterance,
remove the crust of the magic letters.
Let it release its subtle essence.

Let the freedom bubble burst.

He echoes something similar in ‘Rain in the Wild’.

I listen to the rain, call the red hibiscus by name,
let me be this unguarded always
speaking without the need of words
because breath is the oldest language
in this remote village green of Jhanor.

Sanjeev Sethi calls Lahiri’s poems “a celebration of images: variegated images in all their hold and heft.”

It is indeed true. Lahiri’s images are fractured and frightening at times, as they show the disharmony in life; have libidinal undercurrents at different times, bringing out the sensual vibrancy and urgency of life; and are soothing and renewing in others, as they strive towards some coherence and symmetry. But in all cases, the felicity of the visual language is evident.

Evocative phrases like “low viscous hiss of the evening”, “handful of sky moves from one planet to the next”, “walls of broken embraces”, “blood moon giving a morsel of words”, “streaming rays bleed alizarin crimson”, “unknown birds fly in a zone of silver vapour”, “bags of promise and poison” and the “silver lily lifts its feet and floats” create worlds of their own evocatively with an effortless ease.

As narrative is not the point and is often given a miss in dealing with the abstract, Lahiri deftly uses sensory images to convey the vague, the untouchable; in the hands of a lesser poet, its use could go awry—not in his. His phrase “smile is a paper-thin feeling” upturns visual imagery inventively, his labels of memories as “wet” and “bleeding histories” show how he bends tactile imagery and his line “whispers gathered in a magic box are silent and loud” is an example of how he twists auditory imagery to describe acts and emotions.

While tackling abstract ideas head-on, with no filters, he uses several strategies. He goes for impact: “torrential rain/holding tsunami/in my hand”; he keeps the abstract hazy “shadows take the silence along with them” and he uses rhythm, the power of sound, to give shape to the shapeless “these will be only dots, syllables and smears/speaking to me only in semaphore”. First-time poetry readers may need context and interpretation of some of his poems as they operate from non-traditional spaces. The feeling of ‘not getting it’ may disconcert, but if they are willing to engage with ambiguity and approach the poems using the clues given, their efforts will be rewarded.

In the end, in this space of abstraction, his message is one of joy:

and silence is everywhere between the walls
lightly touching the string of joy,” (Warmth)