Gopal Lahiri’s Poetry of Motion
The ecopoems in Gopal Lahiri’s Anemone Morning delve into a kind of exploratory myth that engages readers with creative potential, stressing that there could be no division between who we are and where we are.
In his succinct introduction to Gopal Lahiri’s four-section poetry volume Anemone Morning (Penprints, 2024), Dr. Ranu Uriyal Pant describes Lahiri as a poet “constantly trying to understand movement.” Throughout Anemone Morning, we are met with images and structures that invoke this movement. The opening section “Resurrection” implies that a beginning is also an end. Lahiri invokes the nature of resurrection as he writes, “The shadows start screaming for silence / beside the bright blossoming flowers” (“Anemone Morning”). This image has a restrained power that invites the imagination more than the senses toward an understanding. As the poet further states, “The resolutions fade in the rising sun / splits me like the flakes of mica schist / I carve them in my own image.” The creator aligns himself with creation through his workings.
In “Single Sleep” the poet’s vulnerability is carefully constructed from his sleep state, “at the tenderness and pathos / echo the searching in silence”. The first section embodies the music of Nature through Memory which “gives me a reason to smile” at the “music of Azure” (“Azure Music”). Morning is aroused through the abstract motion of musical senses rather than expressly tactile description. “Azure Music” is also a poem of the living moment as much as it is about memory.
The blending of memory and nature invoke time as co-creators. “I make unseen and unborn poems for others / dragging my shadow into sad lines / not rhythm but pulse making arguments,” (“Starlight”) Lahiri writes. Through this personification of starlight, it is assured that nature is poetic because She, like life itself, has motion and force. This poetry of light and motion is extended in “Red Hibiscus” with the lines “I ask the sun to give her strength / she can now speak in the language of a flower.” It feels as if light is the life-giving energy that transmutes into myriad forms. “You snuggle / between silence and solitude” writes the poet on the passage of time.
Unexpended drizzle ready for the
destined travels, regulate its march back to
untuned rhythm, breath still hangs
on the wall shining in the drunken brass lamp. (“Drunken Brass Lamp”)
By appealing to this “rhythm”, the poet converts time into parts akin to music. “Destined” implies there is a path meant for arrival. This conveys memory within an image of a lamp which illumines. Are we invited to perceive a moment as fated or part of a system of collective fates? Lahiri writes, “[…] everything I see hides another thing / there is so much other movement I do not perceive,” suggesting that hidden within the visual world is motion itself. By motion, we can construe the fact of energy taking multiple forms to construct a bountiful world of shapes and objects, akin to Einstein’s most famous equation.
“The face-to-face encounter with the sublime / stretches on all sides,” Lahiri writes in “Slow Breath” to imply universal sensation. The sublime is nature’s beautiful and startling array of forms. In this poem, the poet cuddles to sleep “counting moments.” The relationship between time and energy is profoundly uttered. However, one must ask is there something containing the energies of creation? What might that containment mean? In “Red Hibiscus” we have a suggestion: “I ask the sun to give her strength, / she can now speak in the language of flower.”
The jasmine tree births the moment of flowering through the light of the sun. Light is a metaphor for the energies that sustain life. The effect of this poem is life-giving.
However, in the section “Dream’s Search—Green Path” we enter the domain of enclosure, a metaphor for the containment of energy. The poet writes, “Every forest has its own history, / its own allusion” in “Take me to the forest”. The “unexpected” gives “exploratory” power to the journey. The forest is also metaphor for “the impact, / The human impact” (“First Page”) and this poem also questions why only certain minds perceive the damage of anthropogenic climate change. History is not disjointed moments as “What will happen is already happening.” The urgency is clear. The title “First Page” also invites the idea of beginning, but an ending is implied.
This piece of ecopoetry also questions the role of the author. Are we writing our own history as we live? In “End Game” finality is induced with the lines, “Now a metal road, wide, it’s heartless. / we are travelling fast, faster than light” as the poet also invites us to question why we name animals and plants. Human agency is given to remind us of the frailty of life and to insure we will protect it.
Where will we go from here? Do these lines invoke space travel or mental travel? Lahiri further confounds with these questions.
Breaking fragile little clusters
of seashells that collapse and crush
become colourless grains,
murky, burrowed deep inside,
they articulate the language
of the season in silence. (“Triptych”)
The seashells are metaphors for fragility. This image also is parallel with the quoted lines of “End Game”. “Heartless” and “colourless” provide the reader with a world of ending, a world of tumescent facts devoid of communication.
The book is rife with metaphors to explore the creative power of language. However, this poem is preceded by the poems “Annihilation” and “Change”, suggesting the impact such creative language has. The juxtaposition of the lines,
Bushes thriving under the hot sun,
will laugh with the wind of curse
behind them,
stones are now free from their places,
eroded and deported far away (“Annihilation”)
with “Now little seeds sprout, / the rough edges of the world / are toned down” (“Change”) anticipate the “season in silence.” The continual motion machine of nature offers hope and beauty; humanity, thus, is handled the responsibility to preserve natural spaces.
By appealing to this “rhythm”, the poet converts time into parts akin to music. “Destined” implies there is a path meant for arrival. This conveys Memory within an image of a lamp which illumines. Are we invited to perceive a moment as fated or part of a system of collective fates?
In the section “Mind’s Eye” the imagination is a “frontier.” In the poem by this name, Lahiri writes “This is the truth, not the stretched / non-immortal breaths burn like daylight when / the sun pierces abandoned infant hands.” Lahiri notes again that Nature is comforting in such troubling times as ours. The truth he references is the “thick air” from the first stanza. The openness of Nature is the paradigm of ultimate freedom because She is “indifferent to history” (“Amnesia”) and “There are no forevers in each footprint I make” (“Small Wonder”).
In “A Silent Sky”, the transience of things invokes freedom because nothing has staying power: “Night is finely hand-stitched here / the past takes the thing of shreds and patches / and torques them into the realm of the surreal.”
“Torques” implies motion and force. The realm of the surreal is the eternal. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. The poet’s dream is a metaphor for the capsizing of time into discrete bundles. As we sleep, we condense time into dream.
In “Smell of Absence” Lahiri writes, “[…] tiny birds / sit on the transmission wire, they are a lot / like love and light telling me to confess my sin.” The observer becomes observed by Nature’s powers, instilling shame and guilt. The poem ends “I collect my losses, my treacheries, and slice / my days into love and love lost.” Equating love and light is more than the invocation of a cliché. Love and light are frames of Being.
However, “Slave Cabin” heightens the despondency of human choice. Lahiri writes: “All are ready for the lecture to know the truth. / Someone tells me, no one will tell the truth, / it’s all lies, it’s all denials.”
The poem concerns the slave trade but carries a lesson of importance for our current moment. History is the expression of human choices and the ground upon which we make them. It is time’s human essence. The slaves’ cabin is described, “Eyes as intense as black holes, murky cabin / the density of life gone out embracing screams” to suggest environment is analogous to the events within it.
The volume winds down with “Miscellany” which is written in variety of forms including gogyoshi, haiku, and senyru. The concluding section is “Haibun”, a series of beautiful poems in the form. In “Savannah Ghost” history is invoked from the present moment. At the memorial to the Spanish-American War, an anonymous person is clicking photos in a red dress. This person is described later, “You start narrating the ghost stories and about the gravestones.” This is the poet’s own shadow in the moonlight invoked as the concluding haiku reveals.
Throughout these verses and more, the reader is reminded that the importance of environmentalism should not be misconceived. Anemone Morning is a collection of ecopoems that engage readers with subtle science and illuminating language. However, the poems also delve into a kind of exploratory myth that engages readers with creative potential. Anemone Morning stresses that there could be no division between who we are and where we are.
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Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed to Huffington Post, Café Dissensus Everyday, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote, and several other publications. He was given the honor Knight of World Peace by the World Institute for Peace in 2022. He is author of the poetry collections Salt and Sorrow, Knows No End, The Alderman, Only and Again, The Nothing Epistle, The Stone and the Square, and several others, as well as the novella Be Not Afraid of What You May Find. His most recent book is Crime of the Extraordinary (Hawakal Publishers, 2024). You can find him on Instagram: @poetpickering and Twitter: @DustinPickerin2.
