Meditations on Ordinariness: Of Grief, Nostalgia and Memory

Oneness may intrigue you with its philosophical contexture, but the collection is not about metaphysics. The poems in the collection are meditations on ordinariness: ordinariness of grief, nostalgia, memory and even a trivial obsession with the sensuous warmth of a woolen shawl. Intense human experiences may intermittently slip into ‘spiritual leakage’, but they are intensely and sporadically articulated in our quotidian life. Oneness captures the subtle itinerary of human emotions and perceptions. As the title suggests, Sengupta’s haikus (short poems and prose snippets) invite you to realize the wholeness of a poem in the matrix of signification scattered across the page. As you open the page, you interact with a plethora of impressions in the form of words, figures, colours and even blankness of the page. The continuous shifting between the verbal and visual playfully spurs the reader to savour the multiple registers of the poet’s rumination. What structures the layout of each page into a poetic form is the reader’s intuitive poetic sense to elicit emotional coherence while reading/viewing the page. The contestation between the visual and verbal gradually shifts into a poetic collaboration during the reading/viewing process when the semiotic excess of the page is navigated through emotional resonance with the signs on the page.