Kiriti Sengupta has many poetic selves. An untiring experimenter, he cheerfully pursues risk to reach farther and arrive elsewhere. The result is his poetry often changes registers, leaps from mood to mood, and ascends sometimes to unusual ethereal planes. Underneath all this is not just an evolution but an evolving change marked by departures in several directions. He is at his finest when his ear meets his intuition and the images gently explode with unexpected associations. The site of his poetic consciousness is the word, not the phrase, which guards his poetry against cliché and enables it to produce the quintessentially poetic verbal arrangement of non-logical sequencing.
Dustin Pickering’s selection has poems from Sengupta’s nine published books of poetry, followed by a few poems written in 2024 and 2025. The earliest book from which the poems have been taken appeared in 2013, the latest in 2024. This shows he has written and published consistently and plentifully.
Pickering’s selection is based on personal taste and appears to be representative, as it includes some poems in which the poet is not at his best. There are poems in which the cadence falters, or an inessential word sneaks in, or the witness is insufficiently observant. You have the feeling that the poem needed to wait longer and ripen. Sengupta’s muse is gladdest when the usual syntactical constraints are not operative; so the prose-poems often lack the exuberance, subtlety, and surprise of his best poetry (Stagecraft, though, is a class in itself). The muse is cold, also, to events supposed to trigger poetry. The poems on Nirbhaya (The Untold Saga), the pandemic (Boris Johnson in Isolation), the rape and murder at RG Kar Medical College (Demonstration), and the Pahalgam terrorist attack (Fellowship) struggle to take off. Gravity and Stepwell don’t succeed in unshackling themselves from the conventions of prose. Appraisal has too many words and a few but conspicuous phrasal misalliances.
But then, no poet can be at his best in all poems. Randall Jarrell writes in his essay on Wallace Stevens, “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two times, and he is great.” In the space of this tastefully designed 225-page book, the poet is struck by lightning at least half a dozen times. The occasion, always, is – to invoke Emily Dickinson – the soul left “ajar”. Sengupta has the ability to remain profoundly, ecstatically open to visitations of the spirit.
Stagecraft is a celebration of, and a meditation on, theatre as the fifth Veda. The senses, as dwellings of the gods, lead to the experience of action as performance, paving the way to salvation. Freedom, as “improvisation”, illuminates the performance from inside.
Simplicity, economy, and lucidity fuse as sounds and images in Hibiscus. Sweet like Ariel’s song, this is a poem of strange transformations:
Can I become a tree?
As I rampart the sinew
with my root embedded
in her tissue, I’ll bloom
like hibiscus:
the blush will endorse my bloodline.
You watch the magic of transformation in Bhanurekha as “the tree is furnished with animated reveries”, the sunshine is seen to be “falling” like a gold leaf, and “white” reveals “its share of density”. The poetic image exceeds ideation, enlarging the consciousness in flashes of intuition. In Bucolic Bengal, you see “clouds burst into drizzles” as “melody unfurls”. A different alchemy yields the poem “Photography”, written for Raghu Rai. Each of the three parts, symmetrical and three-line long, becomes in sheer brevity and precision a metaphor for the master’s work. “Let the Flowers Bloom” unfolds a story in eight stages. Beauty and dread mingle in an unearthly yet mundane light.
A poet may leave, unknown to himself, traces of his impending journeys in his work. “Clarity”, from 2015, offers a compressed fable of poetic churning as the making of ghee. The intuitive flash in “Eyes of a Yogi”, resonant with the visionary force of Dattatreya’s inspired verses in Avdhuta Gita, stuns the reader into moments of stilled awakening: “The mother transforms into the sky.”
Strangeness and grace, restrained lyricism and loftiness suffuse Sengupta’s translucent earthiness to yield several unforgettable poems in this sensitively curated selection.
The author is a critic, essayist and translator, and a former Professor of English, Punjabi University, Patiala
Spotlight:
Selected Poems
By Kiriti Sengupta
Transcendent Zero Press: Houston, Texas, 2025
Price Rs 750, 225 pages