Description
Time is a recording of the lingering of light: in things, in nature, in the mind. This luminous history becomes the stuff of legends. Religion puts girdles of faith round it and art wades into its flow. Tether that Light is an attempt to pick up and follow the trail of light left in selected Indian miniature paintings, themselves on the trail of visions left like sun and moon signatures by the earliest poets. The poems unpack a treasure-chest of emotions and experiences: from love to despair, from the political to the erotic. On the page, the triptychs begin leftward with the recounting of a legend, the painter’s vision appears centrally on the page, while the contemporary poet’s musings drift to the right.
Sumptuous with the sharp fragrance of herbs, the luminosity of colours, the cadence of song, Tether that Light is sparkling and felicitous in its oscillation between the domain of the pictorial image and the domain of the word. — Ranjit Hoskote
With lyricism and grace in Tether that Light, Debashish Lahiri paints word-pictures, cross-stitching the canvas with lines like “You filled the eyes of a god with water and emptied his heart of air” — creating “a music that has burned my life: silence.” — Sudeep Sen