Description

If you ever climbed a mountain
touching its Adam’s apple, sorrow, its primitive ferns,
flint, its armpits and ambition —
you would have known it is insomniac

Like the fern-gatherers of the title, in this meditative collection, the poet, Sekhar Banerjee, wanders around everyday undertakings and deftly weaves colours, trees, music, metaphors, people and his innate solitude into his poems. Organised into three sections — Floral Bedspread, Fluid Room and Salt and Autumn, these poems look at life and its fallacies with a distinct rhythm and a rare imagery. 

The poet has an uncanny way of turning the familiar into the unfamiliar even as he retrieves our lost links with nature in subtly evocative ways. — K Satchidanandan

Sekhar Banerjee is an author. His works have been published in Indian Literature, The Bitter Oleander, Ink Sweat and Tears, Kitaab, Muse India, Setu, Bengaluru Review, Verse-Virtual, Cafe Dissensus, The Brown Critique, The Tiger Moth Review, Mad Swirl, Panoply, The Pangolin Review, Borderless Journal, Spillwords, Mad in Asia Pacific, RIC Journal, Dissident Voice, Publiknama, IPPL Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, Better Than Starbucks, and are forthcoming in Stand 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 taught in a government school under Royal Government of Bhutan in his early years. He is a former Secretary of Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi under Government of West Bengal. He likes tea, adda and mobile photography. He lives in Kolkata.

Review

Basudhara Roy in Indian Literature

Nourished by deft artistry, intricate poetic design and a firm anthropomorphic vision, Banerjee’s images surprise by their heightened awareness of life’s depth, variety and innate paradoxes.

Gopal Lahiri, Kitaab

In his enchanting debut collection of poems, The Fern-Gatherers’ Association, Sekhar Banerjee brings an impressive range of elegant portraits of life, interspersing fascinating capsules of floral footprints and transformational figures. The poet deftly traces the long-simmering solitudes and secrets between them with skill and purpose.

Aneek Chatterjee, Muse India

Poems from this collection enter your mindscape silently, but not secretly; they enter in a sophisticated manner, without breaking any door loud; and stay for long, long periods, inside you. —

Nabanita Sengupta, Saranga Magazine

…poets like Mamang Dai, Easterine Kire, Esther Syiem, Robin Ngamgom, in whose poems nature is a living, thriving entity. I find The Fern-Gatherers’ Association to be in a similar tradition.

Sutanuka Ghosh Roy, Setu Magazine

The Fern-Gatherers’ Association is a book that leaves you wanting for more just like a second flush of hot Darjeeling tea. The book is a must-read if you are a lover of poetry and nature, and is an addition to the opus of Indian English poetry.

Nishi Pulugurtha, Café Dissensus

The poems in The Fern-Gatherers’ Association bring together ideas, images, and associations, endowing the known and familiar with a dreaminess that fills the senses. It is these varied layers that appeal and lend the poems a universality.

Neera Kashyap, Amazon Review

The Fern-Gatherers’ Association is distinct in its voice and expression. It is this measured juxtaposition of the known and the surreal that gives his poems many layers of meaning that a reader must explore to get to their heart.

Confluence: South Asian Perspective

The book offers succour because it evinces an entirely different mode of consciousness and living where the self is an additive of all the ‘others’ that surround it.