Despite all pronouncements to the contrary, poetry is not dead. But it surely is confronted with a crisis. Its publication and reception are fraught with a risk—a risk that in part springs from the prosaic proclivities of the present and in part from the indifference that noise-saturated sensibility—enamoured as it is by the surfaces—has for anything that demands nuanced engagement with and understanding of life verities. As a literary percept and practice that nurtures linguistic and communicative sensitivity and demands creative and critical accountability, poetry—especially in these times—has become an article of faith; it requires courage and conviction to be a poet now. Sanjeev Sethi deserves appreciation for his poetic persuasions, productivity and persistence.
Hesitancies is his fifth collection of poems, the earlier ones being—Suddenly for Someone (1988), Nine Summers Later (1997), This Summer and That Summer (2015) and Bleb (2021). It is a collection of seventy-eight assorted poems which may broadly be clubbed under four thematic sub-heads: poems as poetic reflections on poetry, poems as etchings of the lived past, poems as reflective abstractions on life, and poems as critique of the contemporary environ and ethos.
What is poetry and what does it mean to be a poet today are questions that repeatedly exercise Sethi’s creative efforts in this anthology. In his opening poem ‘Rake-Off’, he positions his poetry as a dynamic engagement with the self in the global space: ‘When my poems globe-trot, a part of my longstanding love affair with myself, travel with them. They carry my flavors, my failures’ (p. 13).