Description
Sekhar Banerjee’s poetry collection Probably Geranium delves deep into life’s beautiful mundaneness and beyond. Spread out into three sections — Heaven’s Furniture, Belladona & Zinc and Lukewarm Silence — the collection seeks to weave, un-weave and re-weave the patterns of time, shifting moods and the recurring emotions that make up the daily-ness of life, and slowly initiates a search for something more, someplace else, something else.
Sensuous, playful, and vulnerable, Sekhar Banerjee’s poems are loving annotations on a life lived in intimate attentiveness. — Amit Chaudhuri
SEKHAR BANERJEE is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award-nominated poet. The Fern-gatherers’ Association (Red River, 2021) is his last collection of poems. His works have been included in Stand Magazine, Indian Literature, Arkana, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Lake, The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, Madras Courier, The Bitter Oleander, Words and Worlds Magazine, Rhetorica Quarterly, The Wise Owl, The Bangalore Review, The Usawa Literary Review, Verse-Virtual, Kitaab, Muse India, Setu, Cafe Dissensus, The Brown Critique, The Tiger Moth Review, Narrow Road, Panoply, Borderless Journal, Mad in Asia Pacific, RIC Journal, IPPL Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, Better Than Starbucks, The Wire, Outlook, and elsewhere. He has a monograph on an Indo-Nepal border tribe to his credit (Dhimal, Folk & Tribal Cultural Centre, Government of West Bengal). He has several publications in Bengali as well. He hails from Jalpaiguri — an old tea town in sub-Himalayan West Bengal. He had worked under the Royal Government of Bhutan early in his career. He is a former Press Secretary to the Governor, West Bengal. Currently, he works as Secretary, Centre for Archaeological Studies and Training, Eastern India. He likes tea, adda and mobile photography. He lives in Kolkata, India.
Reviews
Maitreyee B. Chowdhury in The Bangalore Review
Banerjee’s poems are deeply introspective, mulling over microbes floating in the sunlight and mulching over the imagined grotesque smell of dogs taking shelter in tanneries in Chinatown. The city of Calcutta/Kolkata becomes his playground, his footprint on it undeniable. Vulnerability becomes him, like a caress on a deeply heated political Indian summer. His thoughts lie divided between the lines and the stunning photographs that are shot by him, scattered throughout the book, adding dimension. There are few scattered abrupt tail ends, ones that you wish were better sewn..and then an abrupt flash of brilliance. Like the most interesting of walks, this is a plate full of sunlight and shadows. Tread where you will. One leaves these pages with the thought that here is a voice to look out for, a confident, assured tread, this.
Geetha Ravichandran in Verse Vertual
Sekhar Banerjee’s poems are intimate and feeling sketches of the ordinariness of life. The poems capture often overlooked moments that yet hold a deeper resonance. It is this quality of the poet that strike a chord with the reader. Everyday occurrences seen through the poet’s lens puts the spotlight on life’s quietness as well as complexities. The book also contains black and white photographs by the poet. The geometry of the cover image, a scaffolding in black and white, with lines and angles, crossing back and forth, is a visual counterpart to the layers and interconnections one finds in the poems. In Probably Geranium, Sekhar Banerjee shifts his gaze adroitly, from the landscape of the hills to the dystopian city with an involvement which is deep and yet dispassionate. … The first section of the book is titled, ‘Heaven’s Furniture’. Many of the poems are centred in the brooding hills of North Bhutan and Sikkim. The acoustics of the hills and the forest is pervasive in the pages of this section. There is a cinematic quality to the poems, as if the poet is rolling out a reel, stopping to zoom in on something like “feral grass”. In this melding of sights and sounds the poet’s mind and heart are laid bare. … Reading the book is an immersive journey. The rich tapestry of the sunshine and rain, of ferns and lichens, of hills and trees and imperfect people with their quirks, flaws and convictions opens up to a world, where a detached sense of observation balances sensuous imagery. The play of the senses is tempered by mental acuity, bringing in an aesthetic balance. The poet’s controls his craft by developing ideas which are never obtrusive, subtly layering detail and drawing out the the rhythms of the language tempered by a delicious sense of irony. The poems in the book have an organic quality, the sense of lived experience. The book Probably Geranium is ultimately a celebration of minimalism.
Ajanta Paul in Setu
Probably Geranium is a joyous celebration of life; ironical critique and philosophical acceptance of the same in the best tradition of a balanced appraisal. The Modernist theme of dislocation, loss and loneliness haunts the collection manifesting itself in evocative epithets that heighten the poignant discourse. In the poem “Of Letters and Addresses” the poet nostalgically recuperates a “bevy of retired postmen…carrying lost letters with good news” hoping to deliver them to their destinations. Dislocation and migrancy are clearly indicated in the ending. … Nature appears to be an important source of inspiration for the poet even as it is setting and symbol. It is less of an abstraction in Banerjee’s present collection of poems, and more a precise geographical location such as the Darjeeling and North Bhutan hills, the Raimatang and Jayanti forests, the Leesh River Tea Estate, Zero Point, West of Bhutan, the Ganges and the Hooghly. References to dark pine forests, fog, winter sunshine, snails, fish, pebbles, moss, lichen, cardamom saplings and the like, permeate Banerjee’s poems with an earthy, elemental quality that is not only deeply sensuous but is, at once intensely personal and reassuringly universal.
