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 |
…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 |
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.
