“It is the time of new beginnings”-Selected Poems by Gopal Lahiri

Poetry is the diary I always carry with me, confides Gopal Lahiri in the Preface to his Selected Poems curated by Sanjeev Sethi and published by Classix, an imprint of Hawakal in 2025.

- AJANTA PAUL

By his own admission, therefore, poetry is his close companion, confidante and communicant, a witness that observes and records faithfully his deepest thoughts and innermost secrets. Lahiri obviously leaves something of himself in his verses for readers to connect with, as in the poem Intrusion, he says, "and you reach me between the lines", intuiting insights that may be gleaned from this self-reflexive residue. The metaphor of the 'diary', closely linked to his creative quest, and the agency of the self in the same, surfaces time and again in Lahiri's work. In First Birth, he is at pains to describe a creative casualty: “slowly a poem dies in my secret diary page”. Poems not only live and thrive, they die, too, in the recesses of the heart. In City of Joy, syncopated words and sentences/ sublimate into the secret diaries”. Here, 'secret diaries' could well be the eventual essence of his poetry, derived from heightened and rhythmic language approximating the truth that the poet strives to distil. Truth then is that evanescent abstraction that practically every poet seeks to attain through his creative endeavours. In the Introduction to his book of poems Some Resonance, Some Desire Lahiri maintains, “Each of us is a seeker in quest of fulfilment”. He tries to access this 'fulfilment' at the cosmic-cellular level through his poetic consciousness in poem after poem with interesting results. In Departure, for instance, it is silence that paradoxically sounds the truth when "the unspent words of the universe, / ring the deepest bell of truth”. In Discourse, realisation of the truth is in the form of an evocative epiphany which takes one unaware. He shares, “The moment of truth comes well after the dawn / without anybody's knowledge”. Knowledge, for Lahiri, is enmeshed with independence and spontaneity, an epistemological liberation that is almost physical in its intensity. Freedom, says the poet in