Half Aroma, Half Face

In the listening night, at the edge of memory, the wheel sleeps in the wheel, and only in mirrors life burns, and burning passes into Burning. To you I bring the herbs of lunar healing, through the jade branches of the moon, and you too will feel the snow of alienation on your wings.

The mystic nearness of Being, simultaneously sensual and austere, in the hidden core of consciousness where the voice of silence blossoms like a rose, where Debashish Banerji greets his poems, is the hallucinogenic ground of Banerji’s poems. They arise and slip away, get caught in the treacherous eddies of techno-capitalism, wrest themselves from language and concepts that had been appropriated by economic forces, only to slip into the melodic syncopation of voice and dream. The poet works to clear a space for a world history, a cross-cultural flow of ideas, images, and states of being.

Upheavals of consciousness, streams of dialogue, monologue, projected states of dream and being, all flow across and through Banerji’s texts. They lull, seduce, caress; they expose, attack, denounce. The reader is in the streets, traveling through time to witness and confront human corruption, oppression, spiritual degradation, and violence. The reader is lured, and then propelled into rapidly shifting cultural, economic, linguistic, and social landscapes. India has lived many lives and survived many assaults; from the white disaster of colonial racial violence to the hipcats [who] walk the Bombay streets, internationalizing the vernaculars. Banerji’s cultural landscapes are rich and detailed. His knowledge of art history adds texture and dimension to the denseness of his linear exegesis of spiritual beliefs and philosophy.

The poems act as spiritual “break-outs,” sudden manifestations of what is unrevealed in the narrowly defined contexts of history, culture, and economics. His attention to sound clusters and modulations creates verbal sculptures, similar in tone to the brilliantly colored and sculpted facades of the Sarangapani Temple. Each poem evolves, presents a meditative moment or a call to action; a poem’s incandescence becomes its beacon, as it moves through time. Banerji’s poems are not fragile; they are, at times, rough-edged and caustic. The eye of Being often rests on the volatile. The kamikaze return, the costumed traditions burn in protest or bare their fangs and burn whatever escapes comprehension. But the reader should always return to the flight of white birds and to the raga of human aspiring for the divine. Enter Banerji’s poems with a pure heart, a lucid mind, and the courage to wrestle with what cannot always be immediately perceived.

Andrea Moorhead
Greenfield, Massachusetts
December 2016