Poetry in short-hand

The idea of outsourcing the selection of poems to a fellow poet-publisher Dustin Pickering, lends the already published poems of Kiriti Sengupta another round of robust readership. From his debut collection My Glass of Wine (Author's Empire Publications, 2013) to the present batch which contains eight recent poems, Sengupta has so far authored nine collections—a reasonably sizeable corpus of poetry. More than shifts in his style and substance, what stands in this selection is the steadfast consistency with which Kiriti has survived the flashy poetic trends that keep emanating from the space of new media. He retains his signature style—of using words frugally and minimally, with no extra flourish to gloss them with any uncanny poetic surplus. His poems—shorter or longer—continue to be reflective, quasi-mediative, and mildly ironic at times, but there is no anxiety to announce apocalypses or to exclaim some earth-shaking denouements.

The propensity to write aphoristically is palpable right from the beginning. The poem "In Tune" is remarkably dense, and compact: "Remaining under self-control—/ the tongue and the heart have fallen in love./ Look zeroize them—/ be a bird!". Kiriti 's aphorisms are not abstract or thin; they are steeped in heavy textuality. The transitions are not supplied on the platter, it is for the discernible reader to leapfrog from one nano-image to another. Reading this kind of poetry is not a one-sided affair, it demands unqualified readerly plunge as well. Within the space of a few lines, Kiriti suggests a dialectical relationship between ascending fears, and deeper roots that "hold them tighter" (from "Wide"). 

The poems selected from the collection Healing Waters, Floating Lamps (Moments Publication, 2015), go on to consolidate Kiriti's distinct poetics of sprinting towards epiphanic profundities. There is no build-up, no sustained effort to protract the process, and no patience to withhold the climax.

From Kiriti's The Reverse Tree (Moments Publication, 2014), Dustin Pickering plucks out only two poems, which is unfair to the range of the eclectic book which consists of neither well-defined essays, nor short fiction, nor even standalone poems. But both the poems amply bring out Kiriti's ways of dealing with the original unheard. He admits "defining soul is difficult/ rather impossible", yet in the course of the poem, he ventures to bask under its light: "i press two fingers firmly/ on my ears/ let the light dazzle/ my imprisoned candle" ("Reversal – Reverse All"). By a strange poetic argument, the poet sees sexuality as a function of light: "The sun dares to surface/ on your mirror, playing both/ a she, and a he toy" ("Crisis"). Kiriti dissects light, and its each splinter gives him a complementary clue of life, its gay ambivalence.  

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In which Arundhati gives it those ones

The poems selected from the collection Healing Waters, Floating Lamps (Moments Publication, 2015), go on to consolidate Kiriti's distinct poetics of sprinting towards epiphanic profundities. There is no build-up, no sustained effort to protract the process, and no patience to withhold the climax. The poem takes off, and it plummets in seconds to complete the arc. In order to "reach for the sky", the poet draws "a circle in the water", and in the next half-a-second "Looking at the image/ I [he] take[s] a dip" (from "Beyond the Eyes"). The poet does not short circuit the experience, rather he seeks to capture the ephemeral ecstasy without any verbal smokescreen. Similarly, a Varanasi evening is captured in its oxymoronic exuberance: "The water here is not/ a fire extinguisher./ Flames rise through the water" ("Evening Varanasi"). In the poem "Eyes of Yogi", a mother bird quietly sits on her eggs, and soon in a flash the poet spots "tiny wings". The overwhelming concluding line: "The mother transforms into the sky", springs forth—the sight lapses into insight—in a flicker.

In Kiriti's poetry, the reader has to be ready, receptive, and wide-eyed to catch the pregnant poetic moment. His mantra for the artist is "keep an eye" not on the outer earthly details, but on the incisive third eye. "Memories," the poet muses, "unveil themselves through snapshots" ("Moon — The Other Side"). The idiom turns increasingly oblique and at times brutally sarcastic: "You have been practicing/ postures for health and fun./ Kali never fails to protrude/ her long, bloody tongue" (from "Cryptic Idioms–3"). Even in his prose poems, which gather conspicuousness in his collection The Earthen Flute (Hawakaal Publishers, 2016), he does not write in a single stretch, rather he breaks his poems into mini autonomous sections.

In his Reflections on Salvation (Transcendent Zero Press, 2016), Kiriti writes 18 short sardonic prose-verses with each corresponding a chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. Out of the 18 verses of "flash wisdom", the Selected Poems, consists of only 10 that interrogate the relationship between the scriptural and the secular, between the sublime and the sensual. Caught between the pulls of renunciation and attachment, the poet attempts to re-write the self-evident gospels with the modesty of a mortal. In his reflection on "Detachment", his playful interjection, for instance, is pertinent: "I plan to donate a few copies of the Geeta to infertility clinics. I would love to hear them advise: 'Act, but forget!'". Even as he questions the full-proof divinity, he is not loud, audacious or heroic which does not allow, thankfully, the reflections to be incantatory. Incantations can be very intimidating.     

Kiriti's poetry gravitates towards a poetics of solitary stillness that help him dig deeper, beneath the soil. Responding to Vincent van Gogh's iconic painting "Tournesols", the poet goes beyond the mere ekphrastic: "Life would not have been become still / if there had been water in the vase". Similarly, in another poem on Bob Dylan's surprise selection for Noble Prize, the poet vouches for a dynamic stillness: "No comments, it is better to stay quiet/ and keep looking at the skyline– / the Manhattan Skyline". In his next collection Rituals, the stillness of the slumber "unfolds its arms as it wakes up" ("The Resurrection"). Kiriti is driven towards a dialogic interiority: "Death suggests how fruitless/ it is to hold a grudge. / Life has ways to recommence the soliloquy" ("Screenplay").  Though there are poems – like "Masala Muri', "From Being Late in Calcutta", and "On Richter Scale" – in which length of the poem is stretched through a cataloguing of images, but it is Kiriti's innate love for the laconic that overtakes him. The concluding lines of some the poems are felt realizations: "Indianness precedes theology." ("Faith"). Or "Customs are like meditation– / worthy of unhurried contemplation" ("Tradition"). 

In his acclaimed collection of poems Water Has Many Colors, Kiriti tends to be exceptionally succinct, he writes some hard-hitting monostiches – "Proximity is fatal" ("Mutual"). Or "What if I am mute or loud?" ("Prayer"). The haiku poems too retain the rigour and warmth of intimacy: "In the kitchen, / her bangles/ play a carillon" ("Ma").  Even Oneness – which as a title and experience – marks a lapse into a rarefied abstraction – is lent a graspable materiality through imagistic haiku pieces: "the postbox / recedes to rust / the lost art". Another haiku derived from his own professional background of a dentist is patently corporeal: "wisdom / the third molar adds / to the surgeon's expertise". Kiriti can be both frisky and poignant; "Why do I fail/ to prefix Late/ with my father's name?" ("On Exit"). 

Selected Poems carries eight new poems in which Kiriti continues to retain his poetic candour with an overt political surcharge. There is an occasional lapse into rhetoric in lines such as these – "Faiths have failed to foster camaraderie. / Is altruism headed towards extinction?" ("Fellowship"). But the stamp of a laconic Kiriti is all too pervasive. A friend asks a question "Who would you talk to / among the deceased?", and the poet in his characteristic playful vein answers: "Several names crammed my crown, / Dad's included". The final salvo comes: "I answered, God".  The selected poems are building blocks of a narrative placed in a relationship of synchronic simultaneity, and a congenial rhizomatic proximity.

Akshaya Kumar is Professor of English at Panjab University, Chandigarh. He received critical attention for his book Poetry, Politics and Culture (Routledge, 2009) and his co-edited volume Cultural Studies in India (Routledge, 2016).  He is writing A Critical History of Punjabi Literature, a project commissioned by Orient Blackswan. He has also co-edited a volume titled Popular Culture in South Asian Context (Routledge, 2025).