“Sometimes silence works”: Words and Withdrawals in Kiriti Sengupta’s Oneness
Kiriti Sengupta’s Oneness (2024) is a condensed capsule of poetry, one that weaves multiple strains of being into an organic unity. With his vivid and sonic juxtapositions, the compositions in the new collection both obfuscate and enlighten the reader.
Kiriti Sengupta’s Oneness, (Transcendent Zero Press, 2024) is a condensed capsule of poetry, one that—as the collection’s cover image suggests—weaves multiple strains of being into an organic unity. The jacket art by Bitan Chakraborty may be taken to mean an astral network, or equally, a living cell, signifying not only the interconnectedness of all matter, but the similarities between the transcendent and the immanent.
Early on in Oneness, a haiku in its juxtaposition of “moon” and “fireflies”, emphasizes precisely this connection between the cosmic and the coleopteric; the elemental and the infinitesimal:
full moon
across the landscape
fireflies
The expanse of landscape—in the middle line above both structurally and stylistically—yokes the images of moon and fireflies. Belying their difference in size and category, they share a simulacrum in their shine (reflected in the case of the former and emitted in that of the latter) and draws the pairing into a unity.
In the poem “Arrangements”, the speaker maintains that visions delude, as eyes are not necessarily equipped for true cognition. Art, feels the speaker, is to be shared as it does not belong only to its creator. The artist’s space may be shared by other artisans, even as his canvases belong to all. Such a communitarian attitude to art perhaps ties up with the poet’s understanding of “oneness”, the unifying motif in the collection.
Signposts to salvation, most of the poems, brief, buoyant and brilliant, demonstrate a unity of thought and expression that upholds the notion of oneness, even as their irreducible concision bespeaks an indivisibility that is at the core of all life. Samir Mondal’s artwork, varied and vibrant, adds eloquently to the creative thesis already engendered. In a sense, then, the collection is a conversation between the notions of oneness and compaction, with indivisibility being the common negotiator.
The six haikus and twelve short poems in the collection—along with their vibrant visuals—produce an elegant and handy format to reinforce the compaction of Sengupta's work. The pithiness of the poetry, almost proverbial in its effect, emerges from the profundity of vision expressed through the tautest of enunciations. The prefatory poem sets the tone, driving home the point:
Would you reckon them
By their length?
Sengupta’s tone, never far from the satirical, achieves a synthesis of this classical rhetorical quality in poems which devastate with derision and enrapture with effortless ease. In the opening haiku, he deadpans with a laconic lethality:
descent of grace
the priest unburdens
the donation box
Just those nine words, without even the presence of punctuation marks direct the flow of sense down a drop from the mystical to the meretricious. Such a distillation of language naturally tends towards an unadulterated essence of meaning which is a type of oneness—in the sameness of its constituent elements.
In “Savings”, the harsh reality hits one with its hurricane of meaning in lines that contrast the Buddha’s renunciation, with the worldliness of his devotees who reap the harvest of his spiritual sowing.
Ashoka sowed the stupa with reverence
for the devotees to reap.
The inner sanctum of the soul is filled with the material relics of the Buddha in a travesty of true faith.
The element of contrast in satire, dependent on duality for its effectiveness would appear to militate against the claim of unity advanced thus far, were it not for the counter argument that singularity is constituted of (or derived from) multiplicity.
The fourth and final poem of the series “On Exit” further illustrates this point. The glorious release believed to have been achieved through death by the speaker’s father is reflected in the son’s possible coming to terms with the former’s death:
When I floated his ashes
in the Ganges, I realized
my father’s passage from
his bedroom to the crematory
was therapeutic.
Ironic epiphanies dawn on speaker and reader alike, even as possibilities coalesce in a poetry seeking to move (to borrow an observation on Bernard Shaw’s plays) from thesis through antithesis to synthesis.
Sengupta is, without doubt, the priest of paradox. With an unerring instinct for ellipsis and equivalence he invokes the contrapuntal notes of a concept, playing them against each other for best effect. In the poem “Tenure: Early Years”, for instance, he playfully contends that guardians, in continuing to reminisce about their wards’ childhood live out a perpetual nonage, partly vicarious and invariably vivacious. Moreover, because to parents their offspring never seem to grow up, they continue to see them as such:
Juvenescence spans the length
of the parent’s life
At times, this paradoxical element appears as a crowning verse or epithet deriving its punch from the preceding premises or anterior arguments. This is seen to remarkable effect in “The Publisher and the Poet”, where the speaker refutes all the allegations against him, except the one about his impoliteness which, he feels is justified in the event of its active instigation by the other party.
But when you find me impolite
I sustain your objection.
I appreciate your skill
to navigate my air.
This is form at its most formidable, inverting the expected climax of a culminating refutation with the retention of the particular allegation in near legal parlance, as the speaker maintains his right to the alleged flaw by turning the tables on the critic/litigant.
A clever play on words and worlds animates this slender chapbook, expanding the depth of its utterance beyond its lexical brief. The third haiku—a personal favourite—illustrates this contention perfectly through its merging of the said with the unsaid. The postbox physically disintegrates with disuse over time because the art of letter writing has rusted. The terse tercet comprises a minimalist elegy in just eight words, yielding the purest precipitation of meaning:
the postbox
reduces to rust
the lost art
In the poem “Antara Marwah Walks the Ramp”, a similar subsumption of entities is wrought through a clever use of symbol and pun. This is verbal economics shorn to its barest essentials, signifying an evolved aesthetics growing out of a complex conceptualization. The word “arrival” signifies new sartorial launches at the fashion show along with the imminent birth of the model’s baby. Marwah flaunted not only the designer clothes but also her baby bump, and in the process she arrived on the fashion scene and as an independent woman with a mind of her own:
The artist’s space may be shared by other artisans, even as his canvases belong to all. Such a communitarian attitude to art perhaps ties up with the poet’s understanding of “oneness”, the unifying motif in the collection.
The fashion parade
looms large in the new arrival.
The ending sweeps the stakes with its witty play on the word “arrival” and its multiple connotations in the context of the poem.
In the fifth haiku, satire cuts through to wisdom in a stark expression of practical discovery and clinical achievement:
wisdom
the third molar
adds to the surgeon’s experience
The verse extends and subverts the traditional discourse of the patient’s acquisition of wisdom, by attributing the same, or at least, a large share of the credit, to the surgeon performing the operation, as he gains in skill, too. The progressive elongation of the lines may be taken to point to the expanding store of wisdom.
In the third poem of the series “On Exit”, Sengupta demonstrates this point by using irony as an instrument for managing grief. The preceding poem has shown the speaker to be in denial, as he fails “to prefix Late” to his father’s name. The image of “ghee” is an operative one here: the same delectable that had once flavoured the speaker’s plate of steamed rice ironically rendered his dead father into delicious fodder for the devouring appetite of the funeral pyre.
In the crematorium,
The priest asks me to
to smear ghee on my
father’s skin. He ensures
the fire finds Baba luscious.
In the poem "“Primordial Leaning”, the poet uses gentle irony to question the unthinking glorification of women, likening them to different manifestations of mother goddesses like Durga and Kali.
You define women as Durga
or Kali…
You could have convinced
them to fight the evil
He believes such deification merely perpetuates the myth of feminine sufferance which may, in all reasonableness, be replaced by the notion of the militant deity actively fighting evil not requiring a male protector like Shiva, who has to destroy in order to preserve.
Described as “soul script” by Seshu Chamarty in his observations on Sengupta's The Reverse Tree, and “flash wisdom” by Irish educationist Mary Madec in her advance comments on his Reflections of Salvation, Sengupta’s poems redefine generic classifications in their bending of forms. While endings frequently concentrate meanings, the titles of the poems too, at times function as a pithy preamble. “Primordial Leaning”, in the present collection, for instance, anticipates in its titular reference the entire cast and tendency of the poem deploring the dependence of women on men traditionally reified through mythological attitudes.
Examples of such sensory fusion further demonstrate the poetics of oneness that is at the centre of the work. In “Equipoise”, he addresses precisely this mix of the auditory and the visual in his poetry:
Pictures register sonic
waves, stemming from
the surface and beneath,
otherwise unheard of.
Sengupta’s sharp and short, even at times, staccato beats, reverberate to a secret tune that animates the pictorial quality of his imagination. With his vivid and sonic juxtapositions, Sengupta’s compositions both obfuscate and enlighten the reader.
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Dr Ajanta Paul is a poet, short story writer and literary critic. She is currently Principal at Women's Christian College, Kolkata, India. A Pushcart nominee, Ajanta has been published in literary journals including Spadina Literary Review, The Pangolin Review, Offcourse, Atticus, The Statesman, The Bombay Review, The Wild Word, Verse-Virtual, Setu, Kitaab, The Punch Magazine, The Critical Flame, Kavya Bharati and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
