Poetic symphony of nature, love and life

Gopal Lahiri's latest book of poems, Anemone Morning and Other Poems, is another addition to his distinguished poetic oeuvre that explores and explains, suggests, and decodes the core of human existence.

- SANJUKTA DASGUPTA

Gopal Lahiri's latest book of poems, Anemone Morning and Other Poems, is another addition to his distinguished poetic oeuvre that explores and explains, suggests, and decodes the core of human existence. Lahiri's poems innocuously commence with empirical details and imperceptibly plunge into the depths of philosophy and the ontological. It is this creation of a bridge of words between the experiential and the deeply subjective that is the most compelling feature of Lahiri's poetry. In the Wordsworthian sense, Lahiri's poems are at once a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings as well as emotions recollected in tranquility. This dual approach, however, is not in contradistinction; the duality is seamlessly blended in a harmonious symphony of words, images, perceptions and a defamiliarising undertone.

In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which heralded the inauguration of a new language for poetry, poetry about the people and for the people, the celebrated Romantic poet of England, William Wordsworth, had defined his assessment of a poet succinctly. Wordsworth stated, "What is a Poet? to whom does he address himself? and what language is to be expected from him?-He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him." Lahiri's poems exude the power and sensitivity of "the comprehensive soul".