Book Review: Alleys are filled with Future Alphabets

Alleys are filled with Future Alphabets
Author: Gopal Lahiri
Rubric Publishing, India,
INR-275/-
ISBN:978-81-945865-8-6

Gopal Lahiri, the poet wants to smell the minutes in the fabric of life, sculpting poetry that shows how to be alive in its torrential unfoldment. The title itself speaks of an awareness of multiplicity, a present, “formless life” arching to an unmade future. It is a poetry of moods navigating being in the present continuous tense. In the very first poem itself, an awareness of polarities exists—a terrible life that devours with multiple deaths: wounds within happiness, realities coexisting with shadow, self and other, present and past, knowing and unknowing, union and parting, lies and assurances, sermons and love songs, religion and terror, stirred and blighted, fullness and emptiness, ecstasy and inferno. Lahiri’s poems are a buried alphabet deep in the soul trying to make a language of life: silence slits my throat, the secret narrative is now/ in search of black and white ink.

Nestled in the lines is a dreamer-poet, a lover wishing for surreal comfort; hidden in the poems is a subtle belief that love redeems.

-what if the moon melts away and shower silver coins what if a blue-eyed cat start singing love song in a baritone.

– I am going to give the stars a call for the undestined travel  

–I still love, I promise I still love.

-the lights we dislocate long back start to fill up our palms.

-A certain beauty is waiting on the street/ with something that cares, that cultivates.

Stark imagery abounds expressing a primal loneliness; an acute awareness of the passage of time and its vagaries:

 – the hungry face of the wind screams under the leafless tree  

–  Someday morning shrinks inside me  

-My own moon landing in dream goes horribly wrong, my inside burns for reasons that are unclear,

-the pavement will now be cleansed of lies,

-not much haemoglobin in our veins/ already tainted with guilt and pain

– dialogues are now in long queues

-I leave some left-over handshakes.

-Night’s piranha swallows the pale moon/ on the staircase, stillness answers the cry/ of empty doors.

-A layer of dust or was it a frozen memory?

–my past is gliding like fallen leaves/ slowly in silent sighs.

Subtle language play alerting us to contemporary culture:  The birds are nestled between tweet and silence.  An allusion to the noise of modern life, noise of social media and hyper realities. Lahiri possesses a unique suggestive power to alchemize obvious phenomena into unsaid angst: the flower in the vase bled only colour, I have slowly rebuilt my cells here. In so many poems such as ‘Raindrop’, ‘Holy water’, ‘Mantra’ and ‘New world in the waiting’ the poet paints with exquisite delicacy bringing an immediacy to the reader of a rain drenched evening, bathing ghats, a morning sun and a street-heart. Poems like this shine with the poet’s heart exhibiting the poet as muse and mused. In ‘Ecstasy’ and ‘Picasso’s guitar’ the poet states his world view- the heart confines itself in vastness; between dualities he treads for meaning, dualities that require the burning in inferno; between poetry and poet lies his heart.

A poet keenly aware of poetry and that the art of poetry is the making of life—and self. At the core of the poetry is an excruciating sense of ‘I’ navigating the universe, sometimes alien, inhospitable, unkind and sometimes magical.

A poet in search of himself knowing there are no finalities.

A poetry that states living is half- presence and half-absence.

A poet who confesses known limitations: I stand motionless, not knowing these calls and answers, If only I can piece together the light beams, no one here really knows why we are here,

But, still dares offer a poetry that never ceases to try and Live!:

If I could, I would take you to the land of love and light.