Poetry review – A CERTAIN PENANCE OF LIGHT: Julian Stannard discusses Debasish Lahiri’s unusual approach to ekphrastic poetry
A Certain Penance Of Light
Debasish Lahiri
New Delhi: Red River, 2025
ISBN 978-93-48111-40-1
112 pp
Offering some thirty poems responding to paintings and visual imagery, this collection is purposefully ekphrastic. The artwork, inter alia, includes Magritte, Van Gogh, Ravi Varma, Rembrandt, Breughel, Turner, Monet, Picasso, Chirico. As Debasish Lahiri acknowledges, this is not virgin territory. Ekphrasis is ‘that Mistress Overdone of artistic tropes in modern times.’ Yet this reader was intrigued by the way the poet established his modus operandi. Lahiri’s project is compelling, thought-provoking, playful and erudite. A Certain Penance of Light comes with an important introductory essay. Lahiri is another poet in Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire but with new things to say.
Poets have always been drawn to the visual. Book 18 of the Iliad, for example, provides the legendary description of Achilles’ shield. However Lahiri tells us in general that a great painting ‘can be an impenetrable barrier’, not providing ‘even a hair-crack to slip inside.’ The writer might overcome this by taking an oblique approach. Lahiri’s engagement with Raphael’s ‘Miraculous Draught of Fishes’ is a case in point. He writes: ‘For me the heart of Raphael’s painting, the boat carrying the two incredulous fishermen, Peter and Paul, the future founding fathers of the Christian church, along with the Messiah, was to be avoided at all costs.’ His interest, on the other hand, focusses on what is seen in the foreground, at the bottom of the painting: ‘a comparably mundane and unremarkable set of fishing birds on the banks of the Sea of Galilee’ The knowing poet/artist, in effect, is always working out how to get themselves into the story which often means taking the less obvious route. This invokes Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’; though here of course Auden’s sideways glance is a celebration of Brueghel’s sideways glance: ‘Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.’
In Lahiri’s engagement with the ‘Miraculous Draught of Fishes’, there’s an interesting reading/misreading regarding the species of the birds. Lahiri sees them as cormorants rather than herons; cormorants symbolically freighted with sinister connotations. There are several disturbing notes in the collection. See ‘Dream’, for example, Lahiri’s response to Breughel’s ‘On A Magpie on the Gallows’ and also the poet’s reaction to the hanged giraffe in Magritte’s painting for Madame De Vecchi.
The introduction also contains familial and personal reflections. As a boy, the poet had discovered a disintegrating picture of an Indian nobleman in a closet under the stairs. He later discovers that works by Ravi Varma (1848-1906), famous for fusing Indian and European styles, were purported to have been in the family. The one in question, about which Lahiri writes a beautiful eponymous poem, is ‘Shantanu and Ganga’. Years later when the room under the stairs is cleared the painting disappears. It is thought the purchaser of the painting was the great uncle of Lahiri’s father. Idaspati Lahiri, painter and a writer and speaker of several languages, was the black sheep of the family. Held responsible for the family’s economic decline he made things worse by converting to Christianity. He was immediately made persona non grata and his journals of poetry were burnt on a pyre in the garden. News came in the 1930s that he had died of pneumonia, now calling himself Imanuel, which in the Christian tradition is another name for Jesus. Lahiri wonders what Idaspati’s paintings would have been like. Maybe they were also burnt in the family’s attempt to eradicate his memory; ‘memory’ being a significant word in the book as a whole. Lahiri writes: ‘There’s no one in the family who can tell me. I can only imagine.’ This compelling, if rather sad, story leans heavily on A Certain Penance of Light. The work is an act of re-imagining, of restoring Idaspati’s position, who becomes for the poet a heroic maverick figure. That rotting picture hidden away under the stairs, seemingly the wellspring of Lahiri’s creativity, is triumphantly pulled into the light and made whole. Father’s great uncle is brought in from the cold. The collection, therefore, is an act of penance, not least in its embrace of internationalism – ekphrastic poetry itself a cultural translation – and its repudiation of bigotry.
Visual tone and/or visual mood characterises A Certain Penance of Light. The juxtaposing aesthetic of light and darkness, with penumbral middle ground, enacts, as the pages are turned, a dialectic of obfuscation and clarity, of melancholy and joy, of plenitude and denial, of the transcendent and the mundane, of life and death. Art and literature have long become the crucible in which not only celebration but also prejudice and punishment are tested. Picasso declared that ‘Art was an instrument of war’; dictators burn books; the Nazis put on the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937 – modernist art, in effect – in order to persuade the German people of their need for purification.
Unsurprisingly, in Lahiri’s project, there’s a significant intercultural dynamic. Whilst it’s easy to be mesmerised by the physicality of paintings (not to mention their financial value) Lahiri maintains that it isn’t a ‘feudal lord-retainer relationship’ but rather it’s ‘a fugal one between writing on the one hand and painting or sculpture on the other.’ Whereas, Lahiri continues, there’s a degree of uncertainty about this idea in the West, writing in India ‘has always been used as a parallel technique of depiction amongst a panoply of choices available to the artist that included painting and music. It’s an organic, seamless switch from pen to brush, from brush to tone, from tone back to the seismic signature of ink on paper.’ Indian Miniature paintings are cited as an example. In ‘Words in a Garden’, Lahiri’s response to a Mughal Miniature by Nanha/Bishndas (1590), we’re given:
Raw,
shoot-naked,
sap-drivel
word
shall grow as branches
and poetry
that new miniature
shall be the dream of rose.
These lines characterise Lahiri’s spare graceful free verse. The modernists were by nature interdisciplinary and Lahiri frequently employs an adamantine, imagistic approach in his quest for luminosity, hence modifying or complementing the abstract. The poet-critic Donald Davie (1922-1995), hedged in by Movement sensibilities, argues in ‘Ars Poetica’ that in the wake of literary greatness contemporary poets can only make ‘small clearances’ and ‘small poems’. Lahiri is rather more adventurous. I like to think of his poems as raiding parties which might carry off a great prize. I end by quoting some lines in response to Giorgio di Chirico’s magnificent ‘Mystery and Melancholy of a Street’ (1914):
On the green bared chest of the city —
lying prone beneath rainless skies,
dreaming of stars through showers,
through the omnibus windows
Centaurs emerge…
half horse, visible from the omnibus.
.
Julian Stannard’s New and Selected Poems was published by Salt (2025)
Aug 24 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Debasish Lahiri
Poetry review – A CERTAIN PENANCE OF LIGHT: Julian Stannard discusses Debasish Lahiri’s unusual approach to ekphrastic poetry
Offering some thirty poems responding to paintings and visual imagery, this collection is purposefully ekphrastic. The artwork, inter alia, includes Magritte, Van Gogh, Ravi Varma, Rembrandt, Breughel, Turner, Monet, Picasso, Chirico. As Debasish Lahiri acknowledges, this is not virgin territory. Ekphrasis is ‘that Mistress Overdone of artistic tropes in modern times.’ Yet this reader was intrigued by the way the poet established his modus operandi. Lahiri’s project is compelling, thought-provoking, playful and erudite. A Certain Penance of Light comes with an important introductory essay. Lahiri is another poet in Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire but with new things to say.
Poets have always been drawn to the visual. Book 18 of the Iliad, for example, provides the legendary description of Achilles’ shield. However Lahiri tells us in general that a great painting ‘can be an impenetrable barrier’, not providing ‘even a hair-crack to slip inside.’ The writer might overcome this by taking an oblique approach. Lahiri’s engagement with Raphael’s ‘Miraculous Draught of Fishes’ is a case in point. He writes: ‘For me the heart of Raphael’s painting, the boat carrying the two incredulous fishermen, Peter and Paul, the future founding fathers of the Christian church, along with the Messiah, was to be avoided at all costs.’ His interest, on the other hand, focusses on what is seen in the foreground, at the bottom of the painting: ‘a comparably mundane and unremarkable set of fishing birds on the banks of the Sea of Galilee’ The knowing poet/artist, in effect, is always working out how to get themselves into the story which often means taking the less obvious route. This invokes Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’; though here of course Auden’s sideways glance is a celebration of Brueghel’s sideways glance: ‘Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.’
In Lahiri’s engagement with the ‘Miraculous Draught of Fishes’, there’s an interesting reading/misreading regarding the species of the birds. Lahiri sees them as cormorants rather than herons; cormorants symbolically freighted with sinister connotations. There are several disturbing notes in the collection. See ‘Dream’, for example, Lahiri’s response to Breughel’s ‘On A Magpie on the Gallows’ and also the poet’s reaction to the hanged giraffe in Magritte’s painting for Madame De Vecchi.
The introduction also contains familial and personal reflections. As a boy, the poet had discovered a disintegrating picture of an Indian nobleman in a closet under the stairs. He later discovers that works by Ravi Varma (1848-1906), famous for fusing Indian and European styles, were purported to have been in the family. The one in question, about which Lahiri writes a beautiful eponymous poem, is ‘Shantanu and Ganga’. Years later when the room under the stairs is cleared the painting disappears. It is thought the purchaser of the painting was the great uncle of Lahiri’s father. Idaspati Lahiri, painter and a writer and speaker of several languages, was the black sheep of the family. Held responsible for the family’s economic decline he made things worse by converting to Christianity. He was immediately made persona non grata and his journals of poetry were burnt on a pyre in the garden. News came in the 1930s that he had died of pneumonia, now calling himself Imanuel, which in the Christian tradition is another name for Jesus. Lahiri wonders what Idaspati’s paintings would have been like. Maybe they were also burnt in the family’s attempt to eradicate his memory; ‘memory’ being a significant word in the book as a whole. Lahiri writes: ‘There’s no one in the family who can tell me. I can only imagine.’ This compelling, if rather sad, story leans heavily on A Certain Penance of Light. The work is an act of re-imagining, of restoring Idaspati’s position, who becomes for the poet a heroic maverick figure. That rotting picture hidden away under the stairs, seemingly the wellspring of Lahiri’s creativity, is triumphantly pulled into the light and made whole. Father’s great uncle is brought in from the cold. The collection, therefore, is an act of penance, not least in its embrace of internationalism – ekphrastic poetry itself a cultural translation – and its repudiation of bigotry.
Visual tone and/or visual mood characterises A Certain Penance of Light. The juxtaposing aesthetic of light and darkness, with penumbral middle ground, enacts, as the pages are turned, a dialectic of obfuscation and clarity, of melancholy and joy, of plenitude and denial, of the transcendent and the mundane, of life and death. Art and literature have long become the crucible in which not only celebration but also prejudice and punishment are tested. Picasso declared that ‘Art was an instrument of war’; dictators burn books; the Nazis put on the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937 – modernist art, in effect – in order to persuade the German people of their need for purification.
Unsurprisingly, in Lahiri’s project, there’s a significant intercultural dynamic. Whilst it’s easy to be mesmerised by the physicality of paintings (not to mention their financial value) Lahiri maintains that it isn’t a ‘feudal lord-retainer relationship’ but rather it’s ‘a fugal one between writing on the one hand and painting or sculpture on the other.’ Whereas, Lahiri continues, there’s a degree of uncertainty about this idea in the West, writing in India ‘has always been used as a parallel technique of depiction amongst a panoply of choices available to the artist that included painting and music. It’s an organic, seamless switch from pen to brush, from brush to tone, from tone back to the seismic signature of ink on paper.’ Indian Miniature paintings are cited as an example. In ‘Words in a Garden’, Lahiri’s response to a Mughal Miniature by Nanha/Bishndas (1590), we’re given:
These lines characterise Lahiri’s spare graceful free verse. The modernists were by nature interdisciplinary and Lahiri frequently employs an adamantine, imagistic approach in his quest for luminosity, hence modifying or complementing the abstract. The poet-critic Donald Davie (1922-1995), hedged in by Movement sensibilities, argues in ‘Ars Poetica’ that in the wake of literary greatness contemporary poets can only make ‘small clearances’ and ‘small poems’. Lahiri is rather more adventurous. I like to think of his poems as raiding parties which might carry off a great prize. I end by quoting some lines in response to Giorgio di Chirico’s magnificent ‘Mystery and Melancholy of a Street’ (1914):
.
Julian Stannard’s New and Selected Poems was published by Salt (2025)