Overview
Lahiri’s poems are replete with imagery of geological formations, creating a sense of timelessness of Nature. Woven into Lahiri’s depiction of Nature is an awareness of his solitude in the midst of it.
Gopal Lahiri’s 2025 collection Selected Poems, curated by Sanjeev Sethi and polished by Classix, an imprint of Hawakal, serves as a great introduction to the work of a prolific contemporary bilingual poet. Lahiri has published more than 18 collections of poetry, and his poems have been widely translated and anthologized. The present collection brings together in one volume a diversity of poetic themes and styles that characterize Lahiri’s oeuvre. Lahiri mentions in the preface that this anthology offers glimpses into his poetic output of the last fifteen years, drawing from eight of his published collections.
One of the dominant tropes in the collection is the poet’s intimate observation of Nature. The first poem in the collection, “Crossing the Shoreline,” depicts the geological undulation of the shoreline, which seems to parallel the inhalation and exhalation of the poet persona’s own physical breathing.
This sets the stage for a unique communion with Nature in subsequent poems. In “Anemone Morning,” the poet persona seems to be walking on a wet shore “near the yellow floral sea.” This proximity to Nature prompts a state of meditativeness. The moment of dawn produces a shift in consciousness: “rising sun/ splitting me like flakes of mica schist.”
Notably, Lahiri’s poems are replete with imagery of geological formations creating a sense of timelessness of Nature. Woven into Lahiri’s depiction of Nature is an awareness of his solitude in the midst of it. This solitude is generative of introspection as well as an awareness of the fragility of many of Nature’s gifts.
“Red Hibiscus” is a celebration of the blossoming of the flower, rendered with the specific botanical language of stamens, pollen, and capsules. Yet it ends with almost a prayer directed to the sun to give the hibiscus strength. This seems to express an awareness that beauty offered by Nature is fragile and impermanent in an age of climate change when shorelines, water bodies, and the flora of various parts of the world are rapidly changing.
Nature often becomes the backdrop for human relationships in Lahiri’s poems. In some poems, we witness the sharp intrusion of human passions and traumatic wounds. “Lilith In You” is a bold use of the myth of Lilith to invoke the memories of perhaps a destructive relationship that continues to lacerate.
Sometimes memory is invoked not as a destructive force but as the carrier of the lost presence of a bygone world. “Grandpa’s Wheelchair,” although rooted in the description of an old familiar object, evokes memories of youth’s high emotions as well as its inevitable evanescence.
Similarly, “Grandma’s Piano” invokes the long-ago movements of Grandma’s fingers on the piano keys, which produce an intense longing for a person and a time no longer possible to reclaim.
Several poems in the collection are devoted to Lahiri’s memories of travels to various sites in India and the U.S. “Memory of Sky” draws on the memory of Banaras (Varanasi) and pays homage to Jayanta Mahapatra’s poem “Dawn.” It is also an ekphrastic poem that conveys in words the colors of Banaras painted by Manu Parekh. The last lines of the poem seem to blend the sensations of the landscape of Banaras with the hues of the painting:
there is memory of sky in this dark chamber,
of the sun going down, how the earth smells,
paint, brush, hands, and everything.
The prose poem “Savannah Ghost” transports us to the landscape of the American South with specific references to Forsyth Park in Savannah, the tram car, and the distinctive vegetation of Spanish moss. “Lodhi Garden,” “Manipur Vignettes,” and “Arthur Lake” offer luminous images of Lahiri’s memories associated with his travels.
Some of the most moving poems in the collection are those that evoke the gritty urban landscape of Kolkata, Lahiri’s home and poetic inspiration. In “Traverse,” we glimpse at urban poverty. The poem also evokes memories of historical trauma experienced in wars and migration still lingering in “Grief, wounds, the previous life.” Images of urban poverty emerge again in poems like “The Wall of Silence.”
“Hungry Walk” is a powerful depiction of the migrant labor crisis triggered by the draconian lockdowns instituted during the Covid 19 pandemic in India. In the lines “somewhere the curling script of history hangs over/ the old crossword book of migration,” Lahiri fuses the recent memory of the Covid migrants with the various waves of migrants that the city of Kolkata has known through successive partitions and movements of human masses facing violence or hunger.
Lahiri experiments with many poetic forms. Several poems experiment with different versions of the couplet form. The concluding section of the collection is a sequence of haikus, a Japanese form of strict syllabic length, that Lahiri deploys to depict various emotions from changes in the natural landscape to the tumult of human emotions, including political disappointment.
Indian Writing in English has tended to privilege prose genres with the consequent neglect of poetry. Poetry can take greater imaginative risks than fiction because it is not tied as closely to the demands of a few elite publishing houses that occupy the major share of the market. In an age of diminishing readership, poetry is the perfect way to reintroduce ourselves to the lost art of reading a book.
A collection like this can be read a little at a time and does not demand a continuous stretch of time. As one savors the collection, there is bound to be a poem that sparks the reader’s imagination and makes them see a familiar object in a new and luminous light, falling under the spell of poetry and abandoning previous notions of its difficulty as a genre.
Gopal Lahiri Selected Poems
Selected by Sanjeev Sethi
CLASSIX (An imprint of Hawakal)
Aug 2025, ISBN: 978-81-988424-0-4, ₹650, 128 pages
