Kiriti Sengupta

Rituals is a remarkable collection of poems by renowned poet, translator, editor, and critic Kiriti Sengupta. This latest book explores the panoply of human experience and elucidates the meanings and rhythms of a mature poetic life. "Customs are like meditation," writes Sengupta as he weaves religious liturgy and the opera of gods as the quotidian backdrop of married life and experiences with his son. Not just interested in the matter of appearances as a poet, he delves into questions of what makes an Indian and how Hindu goddesses can strengthen willpower and remove the 'venom' from life. The mythological and the quotidian blend and inform one another, the goddess appears in iterations of the wife, the daughter, the mother. These poems also talk about Monsoon and Muri as snacks that overlap with dialogues of intellect and Sanskrit. Themes such as nakedness and nudity are explored from the point of view of youth and maturity. Striking imagery marks the passing of time on everyday objects where the speaker can now stop and observe the beauty of human traces on life, "My tired eyes uncover the kohl of night." The speaker is not only interested in contemplating the beauty of everyday moments but also faces his reader with the violence of the modern world, in the poem "The Untold Saga" the violence of a mythological world mirrors the violence on women practiced often in the 21st century, offering a powerful statement on the untimely death of Nirbhaya in 2012. These poems are also meditations on our place in the world as humans, the vastness of the Earth compared to our frail bodies with the invitation to reconnect to the natural world.

"Prayers carry lives within" as do these luminous and varied poems: some, brief as a firefly's single pulse from the darkness, some, brightly lit as the long bridge between cultures. In these poems "an enormous God steps in" and reveals. The world is multi-valenced, multifaceted and multilayered. "Live in the layers," another poet, Stanley Kunitz, advises us. These poems dwell a language beyond the many borders of languages. Something else speaks: Truth-of the known, the unknown and the unknowable. "A wonderful world opens up deep inside." You owe it to yourself to read these poems right now, not so much as to get out of your "self" as to come inside. Just as the old maps of the new "India" would label the margins, "There Be Demons Here" within these pages of Kiriti Sengupta: Here Lives The Angelic, right here on this "Earth...where I wish to live." - Lorna Dee Cervantes (Olympia, WA) Poet, professor, editor and publisher, MANGO Publications.

With his master strokes, Sengupta offers an all-pervasive analysis of the microcosm, his seemingly nonchalant style being the most powerful weapon to demolish our long-cherished views about human life: the claustrophobic existence in the City of Joy as depicted in "The Bengali Phenomenon"; the suffering of Christ in the time of crucifixion as written in "Expressions"; and the appalling lightlessness when shadows grow longer as portrayed in "Illumination." Sengupta extends the metaphor of the book's title in some of the poems, emphasizing the essential loneliness of our existence when we speak to ourselves in prose or verse...we are compelled to realize how lonely we are yet how rich in poetry, and Solitary Stillness] is a preparation of the voyage to meet the "infinite" with a poetic brush. -World Literature Today