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.