Myriad Reflections on Life and Language — Gopal Lahiri’s Crossing the Shoreline

Genre: Poetry

Publisher: Haoajan Publishers (2022); ISBN:  978-81-954793-1-3

Price: ₹ 300

Pages: 120

Gopal Lahiri is an acclaimed bilingual poet with 29 books to his name. Apart from the many awards he has received and been nominated for, he is the first recipient of the prestigious Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature. His recent poetry collection, Crossing the Shoreline, puts us in conversation with ourselves as much as it fascinates us with the innovative possibilities of poetic experiments. 

A collection of 90 poems, the book is divided into four sections: “Voices of Concision,” “The 14 Liners,” “Haiku and Senryu,” and “Haibun”. The first section intriguingly stands out as it misaligns itself with the rest in terms of formalistic design. But this is precisely what Lahiri intends to do — blend form and content into an invigorating mélange.

The first poem, ‘Crossing the Shoreline,’ presents an image that is simultaneously intriguing and premonitory:

Darkness lingers in sleep Dreamland disappears,

Unmolested trees still giving shade…

The use of “still” is innocuous but troubling as a deep awareness of transience grips the unsuspecting reader. Lahiri seems to be in a love–hate relationship with alphabets, syllables and language that align both neatly and haphazardly on the “endless rows of … sleep” (‘Crossing the Shoreline’).

As one meanders through the rich tapestry of images in the poems under “Voices of Concision”, one unpacks a plethora of imaginative crossings the poet undertakes. Pushing at the seams of articulation, the poems explore a mazy world the constituent words seemingly promise to unravel. However, it is the silent whispers that have more to offer than the exigencies of language itself. In ‘Story Elements,’ the poet is desirous of nostalgically reconciling with his past, a past that offers to “coalesce around silence, … burning my old letters.” In ‘Old Letters,’ the letters disappear, irretrievably, in the burning smell that reaches his nose when it is “already too late.” As material remnants, they hover on the conscious and subconscious edifice of his imaginative arc.

The poem ‘Conversation’ confronts us with the poet’s creative vulnerability as he tries to grapple with the elusiveness of words: “Words vanish like Houdini when I need them,” giving way to “Love Alphabets” where words become conduits of love and longing. Masquerading as building blocks, the poems carry forward the pain of finding love that might triumph amidst the chaos. There is a constant attempt to grasp the untenable as Lahiri ricochets between the loss of “alphabets” to “another syllable” (‘Crossing’).

The poems inhabit the ambivalent space between the real and the unreal, initiating a dialectic that evolves through sharply visualised images. In ‘More Real,’ approaching the real is a journey into the known and the unknown when seen through the lens of longing and love punctuated with whispers the poet gathers into a “magic box” (‘Whisper’). Memories, racing against time, intertwine in an inexplicable knot. The poet tries to make sense of them as he finds himself “stupidly curious” (‘Curious’).

Lahiri, a wordsmith, is acutely aware of the evasiveness of language. While he “weaves a magical trapdoor” between these pages, he does “not want to go on with more words” (‘Long Read’), as the “alphabets wait like a patient for the touch of” his hands (‘My Poem’). The poems become self-reflexive meditations on the creative process as the reader peeks into a mind, spending his “days … digging for some elusive answer” (‘My Poem’). Lahiri lays bare his poetic consciousness, a deeply internalised one, that he is willing to share unreservedly with his readers. The finely wrought poetic idioms lie at the crossroads of memory, desire, loss and longing; they metaphorically distil into a search for meaning.

The second section, apparently, foregrounds form over content as it is called “The 14 Liners.” These poems are random reflections that imitate the sonnet but go beyond their rigid structural requirements. They cover an eclectic mix of themes: ‘Salvation’, ‘Folded Times,’ ‘Freedom’, ‘Transitory Moments,’ ‘Grandpa’s Wheelchair,’ ‘Black and White,’ ‘Dreamscape’, and ‘Muted Rhythms,’ to name a few. ‘Ancient Lights’ is steeped in the poignant desire to search for the lost and the forgotten as the “new twilight” finds fresh colours. The poem ‘Black and White’ becomes a repository of memories that jostle to keep pace with the changing times and the slippery contours of language:

Childhood memories sink and fade, the insides of the

Sea shells record the exile moments in a broken language.

The collection is strewn with arboreal images. In ‘Simple Breaths,’ the poet walks among the tall trees while the trees extend their long hands. He hears their voice in ‘Soul Music,’ and in ‘Fragments’ the trees offer a connecting link between the drifting snippets of forgetting and remembering. Words delude Lahiri, but in ‘Winter Verse,’ Lahiri counts on them and their power over the ravages of time: “I’m going to give back to the trees / the leaves they have lost.” Hinged on the natural cycle of death and rebirth, the poems capture Lahiri’s ambivalent relation with time and its expression, locked as they are in an incongruous coexistence. In ‘The Image That I Am,” one is struck by Lahiri’s vividly powerful negotiation with wounds from the past that refuse to heal. 

Lahiri is particular about technique and the emotional integrity it signifies. In the third section, “Haiku and Senryu,” there are fifty of them. It is the unexpectedness of their development and their considerable precision that mark these poems. They are self-contained, power-packed performances that the reader, also a spectator, expectantly looks forward to. The poems, arranged in numerical series, forge a sequence of associated images as the “rail tracks run into shadows” and the “day breaks into morning raga.” There is an alluring quickness to the lines that sparkle with a lilting lightness. Natural description can be breathtaking, for instance, when: “azure sky / clouds weaving / featherbeds” (‘#6’), The poems cut across a panoply of emotions ranging from “mom’s kitchen” (‘#24’), “the lasagne in the oven” (‘#31’), “homemade sauces” (‘#33’), “memories yellowing under glass windows” (‘#42’), and “mistakes you deny and lie” (‘#47’).

Although the prevalence of the first-person points to a marked individualism, Lahiri often shifts his gaze, an empathetic one, to the non-human world. One marvels at the “two kingfishers” (‘#27’) greeting the river, the migratory birds taking flight to the new “war zone” (‘#30’), “the city birds / flying in / oxygen resorts” (‘#18’), or “the spiny orange legs / king crab takes naps / in the glass case” (‘#32’).

An impressionistic reflection on life and its many quests, the collection throbs with a vitality that grows on the reader like a carefully crafted dream.

Crossing the Shoreline can be purchased here.