Some books arrive like the weather. You do not choose them so much as find yourself inside them. Kiriti Sengupta’s Selected Poems is one such. It does not knock. It seeps in through the windows you forgot to close. By the time you look up from the page, something in the room has shifted.
The collection gathers poems from nine volumes written over more than a decade. They come from My Glass of Wine, The Reverse Tree, Healing Waters Floating Lamps, The Earthen Flute, Solitary Stillness, Reflections on Salvation, Rituals, Water has Many Colours and Oneness. A few newer poems have been added. The selection was made by Dustin Pickering, whose editorial hand is generous and unobtrusive. The result is a single book that breathes like a living thing.
Sengupta writes in English. But English here is only the vessel. The current running through it is older and stronger. It carries the weight of the Ganges, the smell of incense left over from a ceremony you were not present at, the echo of a flute played in a room that has since been locked. His Bengali sensibility does not translate itself for the reader. It asks the reader to lean in, to adjust their hearing.
This is not poetry in a hurry but built on short lines and wide silences. Sengupta understands that a line break is not merely a pause but a small death and a small rebirth. He writes in ‘Spectrum’:
Water has many colours, smudging pebbles along its path.
Two lines. The world held in them is enormous. Water moves and changes and leaves its mark. Permanence and transience live together without quarrelling. This is Sengupta’s great gift. He allows contradictions to share the same breath. In his hands, the smallest image carries metaphysical freight without buckle or complaint.
The recurring symbols are water, fire, breath and the body. These are ancient materials. Sengupta works them with the patience of a craftsman who has no interest in novelty. He is interested in truth. There is a difference, and he knows it. His poem ‘Souvenir’ turns on a single image of intimacy and origin: ‘Newborn glued to gut,/ flavours of the first liaison.’ The body here is not decorative. It is the site of all meaning.
Sengupta’s spiritual life runs through the collection like an underground river. You sense it before you see it. He draws on Hindu and Tantric traditions not as ornamentation but as genuine inquiry. The sacred appears to him in unexpected places. In the prose poem ‘Salvation’, he writes: ‘No gods, but the breath that creates a home for our life and death.’ This is not atheism. It is something stranger and more honest. It is faith stripped of its furniture, left with only its warmth.
The poem ‘In Dusty Feet’ captures the humility at the heart of his spiritual searching:
I turned back as I failed. I could not hold the grains on my big toes. God remained thumb-sized with dusty feet.
There is no self-pity here. There is only the clean acknowledgment of human limitation. The devotee turns back. The master remains. The distance between them is not a wound but a condition of being alive. Sengupta does not lament this. He honours it.
The domestic poems are among the most quietly beautiful in the collection. ‘In Conversation With’ meditates on marriage with a tenderness that refuses sentiment. The husband and wife have moved past the need for company. They have arrived at something richer than romance. Sengupta writes of ghosts and chairs and stories shared. The poem understands that a long marriage is a civilization. It has its own history. Its own silences. Its own humour.
Then there are the political poems. They arrive without warning and with great force.
The poem ‘Demonstration’ was written after the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata in August 2024. The poem does not raise its voice. It does not need to. ‘Monarch keeps a vigil, / foreseeing a mass mutiny. / Iniquity is ignored / as the records stand revised / for scrutiny.’ The cold bureaucratic language is the accusation. The revision of records is the crime named. Sengupta gives us injustice as it actually works. Not as dramatic villainy but as paperwork. Not as a shout but as an erasure.
This restrained fury runs through the collection’s most recent poems. They come from a tradition of Bengali literary conscience that has always understood literature as a moral act. Sengupta continues that tradition without announcing it. His poem ‘Tradition’ turns a familiar concept into something quietly subversive:
‘Customs are like meditation, worthy of unhurried contemplation. Practice adds to their maturity, I know servitude is congenital.’ Read quickly, this sounds like devotion. Read again, the word servitude cracks the poem open. The tradition that binds is also the tradition that blinds. Sengupta holds both truths. He does not choose between them.
The poem ‘On Exit’ is almost unbearably tender. Sengupta describes the cremation rites for his father: ‘In the crematorium, the priest asks me to smear ghee on my father’s skin. He ensures the fire finds Baba luscious.’ The word ‘luscious’ does something extraordinary. It makes the fire an act of love. It makes grief a form of care. It is the kind of line that changes how you understand both poetry and death.
Selected Poems does not offer comfort in the way that comfortable books do. It offers something harder to find. It offers presence. Sengupta is fully there on every page. He has not looked away from anything. The births and the funerals, the gods and the failures, the quiet marriages and the loud injustices. He has held them all in language that is spare, musical, and shot through with a mystery it does not try to explain.
The poems are thresholds. You do not walk through them so much as pause at them. You feel the cool air on your face. You hear something faint and familiar from the other side.
Then you read again.
Arpan Mitra is a doctoral candidate in English at St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata. His research looks at intersectional frameworks in Indian graphic novels, with broader interests in ecocriticism, posthumanism, and cultural memory within manga and speculative fiction. He’s also the Founder and Managing Editor of Creativitas: Critical Explorations in Literary Studies.