Description
A Certain Penance of Light is a peregrine’s journey under eaves of light — colour, tone, shadow. Stories that were lost in past trails are revivified, while new ones emerge from the conduit of images: stories that tell of the making or unmaking of lifetimes, or a life.
This is neither a book of poems to register an accumulation, nor a museum of visual comparisons. It’s rather a book of language in its battle for an analogical break from conventional to essential poetry. Lahiri is a poet whose language is liquid enough to clean the dark pages of the world. His poetry runs smoothly, image within image, to win the sigh that keeps memories aside. — Abdul Kader El Janabi, Poet, Editor and Visual Artist
This sequence of ekphrastic responses seems to have one foot in dusty reality and the other in dream, rather like the Magi who form the subject of one poem. Images of contemporary city streets and wanderings mingle with those of famous and less famous paintings, each acting as points of orientation to the other. A genuine exchange takes place then within these sensuous lyrics which create spaces of vision uniquely their own. — David Kinloch, Poet, Winner of Cholmondeley Award 2022
A homage, an interpretation, a voyage round the world’s visual art, where sumptuous and inventive language delivers stunning ideas and verbal images one after another. I was almost overwhelmed by the poems’ variety and abundance. This is a collection to be feasted on and returned to again and again. — James Sutherland Smith, Poet, Translator, Critic
Debasish Lahiri is an internationally acclaimed poet. His poems have been widely published in journals like The Journal of the Poetry Society of India, Muse-India, Indian Literature, Inkapture, The Poetry Salzburg Review, Mediterranean Poetry, Weber: The Contemporary West, Six Seasons Review, Byword, The Punch Magazine and The French Literary Review, among others; in French translation in Siècle 21, Europe, Recours au Poème & La Traductière; in Italian in NUOVI ARGOMENTI, in Portuguese in NERVO: Colectivo de Poesia and in Romanian in Contemporanul. His eight books of poetry are: First Will & Testament (Writers Workshop, 2012), No Waiting like Departure (Authors Press, 2016) which was shortlisted as one of the five best collections of that year by Scroll and India Today, Tinder Tender: Poems of Love & Loitering (Authors Press, 2018), Poppies in the Post & Other Poems (Authors Press, 2020), Paysages sans Verbes (Edítions Apic, 2021), Tether that Light (Red River, 2022), which was shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2023, Legion of Lost Letters (Black Spring Press, 2023) and Legiunea Scrisorilor Pierdute (Ideea Europeana, 2023). He has one collection of essays Chiaroscuro Curfew: Essays in the Lives of Art (2020); two co-edited books, Literary Transactions in a Globalized Context (2010), 21st Century Perspectives on Indian Writing in English: A Time to Turn (2023) and one co-authored book, Tragic Survivals: From the Hellenic to the Postmodern (2017) to his credit. Lahiri is currently on the editorial board of Gitanjali & Beyond (Scottish Centre for Tagore Studies), Migrating Minds: A Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism and The Riveraine Muse. Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix-du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019. He is an honorary member of Maison Naaman pour la Culture.
Reviews
Rafael Peñas Cruz in his Substack
Light is at the centre of Debasish’ poems in this book, as it is right that it should, for painting and photography are all about light, about the contrast between shadows and illumination, the way the dark relates to the bright, as in chiaroscuro works such as Rembrandt’s or that fading of light in Turner’s work. … Thus, the poems in “Penance of Light” seem to become a kind of ascetic experience rather than a purely aesthetic one. They work like meditations, and the images to which they relate are like the mantras or tankas used by Zen and Taoist masters. Like in those traditions, the stream of words that arise from Debasish’ observations often aim to silence, just like the works of the painters involved often resolve themselves in darkness or emptiness of space. … The poet looks at the image and becomes a mirror, appropriating the pictorial space, where he sees his own soul reflected. The poem that results from that spiritual experience becomes a space of awareness, not just of self, but an awareness of self in time and space, in the universe, beyond the confines of his human existence.
Julian Stannard in LondonGrip
Unsurprisingly, in Lahiri’s project, there’s a significant intercultural dynamic. Whilst it’s easy to be mesmerised by the physicality of paintings (not to mention their financial value) Lahiri maintains that it isn’t a ‘feudal lord-retainer relationship’ but rather it’s ‘a fugal one between writing on the one hand and painting or sculpture on the other.’ Whereas, Lahiri continues, there’s a degree of uncertainty about this idea in the West, writing in India ‘has always been used as a parallel technique of depiction amongst a panoply of choices available to the artist that included painting and music. It’s an organic, seamless switch from pen to brush, from brush to tone, from tone back to the seismic signature of ink on paper.’ Indian Miniature paintings are cited as an example.
