Book Review: Probably Geranium

Title of the book: Probably Geranium

Author: Sekhar Banerjee
Publisher: New Delhi: Red River
Publication Year: 2024
Pages: 104 pp.
Price: USD 9.99/ ₹ 299
ISBN: 978-93-92494-64-2

   

- Ajanta Paul

 

Sekhar Banerjee

Sekhar Banerjee's latest collection of poems Probably Geranium, divided into three sections, namely, ‘Heaven's Furniture’, ‘Belladonna and Zinc’ and ‘Lukewarm Silence’ impresses with its profundity of thought couched in apparently simple, everyday images which stun the sense with their sheer ontological force. It is the inevitability of the sudden connection forged by Banerjee's verse that enforces the authenticity of the encounter. Take the first poem “An Ordinary Morning”, for instance, where the senses interfuse in a rich interplay of words and images instilling an organicity of effect that is as fluid as it is felicitous.

 

   …when winter boils

   in a kettle, the scent of steam

   and tea leaves fills up every inch

   of the broken silhouette of the sun,

   and you think of old things

   that you could have done 

   in other ways.

 

Ajanta Paul

Rainer Maria Rilke's belief in poetry being a response to the poet's deep inner need to write is eminently attributable to Banerjee who strives to capture the essence of his feelings through appropriate textures of word and image. 

 

Probably Geranium is a joyous celebration of life; ironical critique and philosophical acceptance of the same in the best tradition of a balanced appraisal. The Modernist theme of dislocation, loss and loneliness haunts the collection manifesting itself in evocative epithets that heighten the poignant discourse. In the poem “Of Letters and Addresses” the poet nostalgically recuperates a “bevy of retired postmen…carrying lost letters with good news” hoping to deliver them to their destinations. Dislocation and migrancy are clearly indicated in the ending, 

 

   They search for you

    in your old home town

    where you don't live anymore. 

 

In “The Lake” humans and nature are shown to be “two far-off planets” in their mutual exclusivity, heightening the isolation associated with both orders of creation. In the same poem a technician searching for radio signals is a potent commentary on the human need to establish connections in the vast universe. 

 

   I'm an old radio's mechanical 

   hand trying to touch distant signals

   around infinite space and darkness. 

 

In “Grief in One Line” the hills

 

   remain rooted in a place

   for long

   where they sometimes don't belong “.

 

This lack of a sense of belonging despite stability and community is an aspect of the modern predicament that is repeatedly explored in Banerjee's poems, revisiting the deracination experienced by the Euro-American writers of the 1920s belonging to what Gertrude Stein so memorably described as “the lost generation”.

 

Spiritual apprehensions informing the poems lend depth to the articulation. Referring to boats on the Ganges in “A Winter Morning in Banaras” the speaker says no boats are visible, maintaining, “But you know they are always there in the folds / of the fog”. In “Rosary” the mountains are similarly effaced by the elements: “The mountains are not visible now. They are brushed / by the rain, a single masterstroke / in watercolour”. In both instances, the hint of an entity present though not seen is powerfully felt enhancing the mystical content of the work.

 

Nature appears to be an important source of inspiration for the poet even as it is setting and symbol. It is less of an abstraction in Banerjee's present collection of poems, and more a precise geographical location such as the Darjeeling and North Bhutan hills, the Raimatang and Jayanti forests, the Leesh River Tea Estate, Zero Point, West of Bhutan, the Ganges and the Hooghly. References to dark pine forests, fog, winter sunshine, snails, fish, pebbles, moss, lichen, cardamom saplings and the like, permeate Banerjee's poems with an earthy, elemental quality that is not only deeply sensuous but is, at once intensely personal and reassuringly universal.

 

Alongside this feeling for nature in all its beauty and freshness runs an understanding of the city and its manifold moods. Much like Charles Baudelaire's and T. S. Eliot's urban poetry Banerjee's creativity is stirred, intrigued and tested by the drama, decadence and despair of city scenes. “New Year at GPO” is one such poem which captures the mentioned locality of British colonial Calcutta with an effortless ease. The speaker shares,

 

   Calcutta aka Kolkata, last days of   December, polluted

   air, festivities on Park Street, warm winter, 

   Chinese rice lights, crows on old tram wires,

   three beggars smiling in Queen's Way

 

Describing a Calcutta just waking up from sleep in “Shadows and Blebs”

 

   yawning 

   around the Howrah Bridge

 

where

 

   Municipal supervisors wander the streets

   of North Calcutta, Gothic,

   to search out the lost blackhole lids

 

Banerjee paints the picture of a sordid city preoccupied with a historical calamity; a modern metropolis in the throes of remembered atrocities, imbued with the shadows of a suffocating necropolis. 

 

The prose poem “An Afternoon in Ballimaran” captures, in an outpouring of sensations, the congested chaos of the urban reality, a cosmos unto itself. 

 

   …the shadow 

   of the minarets, the diphthong of the azaan,    smell 

   of treated leather, half-burnt thick milk, splintered

   Urdu-zubaan, scent of dry berries, the narrow alley

   sucks it all…

 

The above description, suffused with a sensory overload of details teases the mind with images of sight, sound, smell and taste, not all of it gratifying, in a rich repast of impressions which captures the hybrid pleasures of a city seething with different registers which come together in a cornucopia of experiences.

 

Lyrical, epiphanic, dramatic - the poems in Probably Geranium are, above all, unabashedly sensuous. Whether dealing with rural or urban themes, the past or present and cultivated nature or forests, the one common feature of Banerjee's poems in the present volume is sensuousness. In the poem “Body of Water” the poet achieves a sublime solipsism, beautifully expressed:

 

   You become a waterbody, a running whole

   and finally

   dissolve into yourself 

   like a lagoon

   of coarse salt.

 

The fanciful imagination of the poet expresses itself through ironic associations and striking juxtapositions. In “Rosary”, “The bathroom has a noisy faucet / as if an entire river is trapped somewhere / You can almost hear gulls screeching, water gurgling”. This may be an example of what Robert Frost (in his letters and essays) called the “audial imagination” receiving and expressing the sense of sound in an extension and intermingling of the faculties.

 

Auditory ruminations achieve a brilliance born of originality in musings such as the following stanza in the poem “Operas*:

 

   You find a roaming vegetable seller 

   with a broken cart

   reciting in a deep baritone in the lonely street -

   carrots, spinach, beans, celery, tomatoes, onions, turnips…

   an opera singer doing an aria -

   a special session attended by none.

 

This is as close as it can get to the real thing. Like the radio mechanic in “The Lake” the “roaming vegetable seller / with a broken cart” singing an aria in his deep baritone becomes a symbol of forlorn modern man striving to communicate with an indifferent universe bent on doing its own thing. Commonplace scenes and situations are recaptured through ingenious perspectives. The poetry lies in the surprising yet complete appropriateness of the equivalence wrought by the comparison in question. 

 

Probably Geranium is a colloquium of voices; a free play of accents as speakers range from the sombre and the conversational to the conspiratorial. “Scent of summer” conceals philosophical speculation in colloquial advice. “Spinoza's Hills” is an exercise in authority. In “Of Letters and Addresses” the tone is that of wistfulness while “The Philosopher's Nest” affects a decadent detachment. One is reminded of Robert Frost's famous belief in what he called the “sound of sense” in this regard, meaning, among other things, the tonalities and inflections of the speaking voice which creates its distinct audial reality as the poem proceeds, exemplifying one or more perspectives from which the same may be approached. 

 

The cover and photographs contributed by the poet testify to his multifaceted creativity, reinforcing through their uncanny mixture of starkness and ebullience some of the main concerns in the poems. There is in Banerjee's superb collection a propensity to linger on the little, often unnoticed things which, for all their apparent triviality, often comprise the vital synapses that hold together the intimate experiences and nebulous mysteries of life. Perhaps, like Rita Dove he prefers “to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details that our lives hinge on”.

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Setu, September 2024