Hawakal
Publishers
185, Kali Temple Road, Nimta,
Calcutta 700 049 (India)
Website: www.hawakal.com
Email: info@hawakal.com
Title: Rituals
Genre: Poetry
Author: Kiriti
Sengupta
ISBN-13: 978-93-87883-52-9
Page: 100
Price: 300 INR | USD 9.99
“Sated with
Bengali flavors Kiriti Sengupta’s forays in English are fraught with the
essence of syncretism. Rituals is his best work to
date.” — Sanjeev Sethi
“[These] poems inhabit a space between poetry and
aphorism in the way he compresses thoughts and pitches them in a tiny enclosed
space. It is the job of a poet to defamiliarize the ordinary. In Rituals, Sengupta does an intriguing job
of distilling wisdom from the dross of our daily life, a necessary condition
for the possibility of poetry and living.” —
Cafe Dissensus
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 a 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.
About Kiriti Sengupta
Kiriti
Sengupta, who has been awarded the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize (2018)
for his contribution to literature, is a poet, editor, translator, and
publisher from Calcutta. He has published nine books of poetry and prose,
including Solitary Stillness, Reflections on Salvation, The
Earthen Flute, A Freshman’s Welcome, Healing Waters Floating
Lamps, The Reverse Tree, My Dazzling Bards, My Glass of
Wine, The Reciting Pens, and The Unheard I; two books of
translation, Desirous Water by Sumita Nandy, Poem
Continuous—Reincarnated Expressions by Bibhas Roy Chowdhury; and he is the
co-editor of five anthologies, Scaling Heights, Jora Sanko–The Joined
Bridge, Epitaphs, Sankarak, and Selfhood. Sengupta's
poems have been published/accepted for publication at The Common, The
Florida Review Online (Aquifer), Headway Quarterly, Moria Online,
The Mark Literary Review, Mad Swirl, among other places. More at www.kiritisengupta.com
Availability
For
India: http://www.hawakal.com/books/english-books/rituals/
For United States: https://amzn.to/2WrYl86
For
United Kingdom: https://amzn.to/2FLwgDh
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