Sekhar Banerjee is a bureaucrat and a bi-lingual poet based in Kolkata. Probably Geranium is his second collection of poetry in English. There is something about reading a poetry collection shorn completely of all kinds of conventionality. Without the traditional poetic form associated with it, minus the measured conventional poetical metres and free of its conformist aesthetics, ironically, the symmetry, beauty, and balance of the form are starkly revealed in Probably Geranium. While this meets the contemporary poetic sensibility, it is not without strange reverberations and a palpable sense of looking beyond the mundane. The volume under review carries its unique cultural context, poetic patterns, symbolism and history, and tapping into its roots leads to the creation of compellingly simple, yet powerful poetry. Amit Chaudhuri writes, “Sensuous, playful, and vulnerable, Sekhar Banerjee’s poems are loving annotations on a life lived in intimate attentiveness”.

The volume is neatly divided into three sections: “Heaven’s Furniture”, “Belladonna and Zinc” and “Lukewarm Silence”. The opening poem of the collection ‘An Ordinary Morning’ sets the mood and the poet distills the very underpinnings of his form in a penetrating, inward-looking re-examination of it. Banerjee writes, “Though this morning’s unassuming vastness/ does not have a proper climax anywhere. / It slowly fills up/ the floor of the universe”. ‘An Urgent Telegram from Eros in Autumn’ stands out in theme and form as it brings the end-to-end encrypted message dipped with love from the God/Eros and stitches the past into the present. ‘Spinoza’s Hills’ is infused with a modern energy; the verse offers a dip into the essence of looking beyond the ordinary in its earthiest and most virtuosic poetic configuration. “We head nowhere/ and we do not rise/ up to our levels/ while the rain/ and ginger petals smell/ like a new born God every week/ in Spinoza’s hills, / as if life is/ always only seven days old”. ‘Solitude’ allows Banerjee to inhabit the mundane with his own sensibility and an awareness of freedom within its structure, “ My shadow and I compose poems,/ conduct scientific experiments,/ translate great literary works, write plays,/ sing elegiac songs/ and discuss political thoughts without words/ at noonday/ in a closed room, in a closed earth”.

Banerjee’s eye for details his deep understanding of the ennui of life and its surroundings metamorphosing the ordinary entity into an extraordinary capturing the mundane moments through his sharp lenses turns a new leaf, ‘as if it is the morning’s opening act, / lukewarm and musical” (‘A Morning Concert’). ‘A Winter Morning in Banaras’ kneaded with the black and white photograph of earthen diyas throbbing with the wicks waiting to light the ghats of the Ganga displays a surreal edge wearing a delicate foggy anklet in control of the worlds around them, but their forms are relaxed as if they are unaware of the powers they possess. “For you know they are always there in the folds/ of the fog/ like effects to a cause, preparing hard, / like us, / for a long, dreamless day/ on the flowing waters of the Ganga/ in the holy city of Banaras”.

“On a Sunday morning, St Mary’s Hill in the rain/ is an island. On top of it, the abandoned/ Bishop’s College is a blurred gothic/ consideration made of wetness and fog, waiting/ for nothing. Not even God”.  ‘Emptiness’ gnaws at our soul and we are divided by a thin chasm running down the centre of our existence. The titular poem ‘Probably Geranium’ is a dramatic piece with an imaginary place as the principal character and ‘search’ and ‘time’ as other characters subsumed within the larger narrative of the ebb and flow of recurring emotions.  The jigsaw puzzle of time which invisibly binds us with ordinariness flows into one another such that it becomes impossible to tell one narrative from the other.

A bunch of black and white photographs clicked by Banerjee embellish the poetry collection hinting at a rupture in his pulsating poetic sensibilities on canvas.  The three sections weave, un-weave and re-weave the fluid grace of changing time, moods, and emotions allowing poetry to spill beyond the confines of the book and inundate the soul.  The photograph of the book cover is intriguing and very different from the other photographs and introduces a sense of discomfort as we look at the two silhouettes: near-absent faces standing at an eerie height on the scaffolding. The absence of faces does not take away the surprising expressiveness of the figures; rather it almost cuts the viewers or readers off from their confidentiality. Probably Geranium is a poetry collection that chronicles the poet’s journey as an artist’s fevered dreams.

The reviewer is associate professor of English, Tarakeswar Degree College, University of Burdwan.

Probably Geranium

By Sekhar Banerjee

Red River, 2024

108 pages, Rs 299/-