Kiriti Sengupta Knihy

Radiance liberates us from the murkiness. One must remember, it's the shimmer that sustains lucency. It is imperative to recognize the light that allows a respite from prevailing darkness. “Light that emanates from the core of gloom is your glow. Goodness, wide-awake among all discord, is your truth.” — Tagore’s lyrics have been the most significant motivation as Kiriti Sengupta, the editor, conceived Shimmer Spring: prose and poetry. He was curious to explore how contemporary writers derive and disperse light. After all, light is a common metaphor for all that is good, illumining, enchanting, truthful, or exuberant.

In Dreams of the Sacred and Ephemeral (Hawakal Publishers, April 2017), acclaimed poet Kiriti Sengupta brings his latest three books together into a single definitive collection that is both outwardly sweeping in its breadth and inwardly meditative. Across the three collections - My Glass of Wine, The Reverse Tree, and Healing Waters Floating Lamps - Sengupta showcases a rare skill as a poet. His ability to oscillate between the delicate nuances of the lyric and the metadiscursive ruminations of prose shows a writer and thinker engaged in a pursuit of the highest wisdom in the humblest of places. As such, Dreams of the Sacred and Ephemeral is a meditative journey. As Dr. Casey Dorman puts it in his review from The Statesman, "The journey is one that draws the reader further and further into personal reflection ... from the world around us into the inner self. Worldly observations become the occasion for explorations of meanings: of the self and its status within the world and within consciousness, and of life's journey from birth to death." Sengupta's groundbreaking trilogy offers poems for the questioning mind, the beating heart, and the soul.

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 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