Book Review: Last Evening Was A River by Aneek Chatterjee
2 min read
Sutanuka Ghosh Roy reviews Aneek Chatterjee’s latest poetry collection Last Evening was a River (Penprints, 2024), observing how this slim volume of free verse is long enough to offer the readers a taste of the poet’s brilliance.
- ISBN: 978-81-974036-1-3
- Price: 300 INR
- Pages: 100
Aneek Chatterjee is an academic and a poet based in Kolkata. Last Evening Was A River is his fifth poetry collection. The present volume consists of eighty-six poems, mostly written in free verse. In the introduction, the poet explains, “Poems in this volume do not belong to any particular theme or genre”. Last Evening Was A River is an intriguing collection of poetry that sets out to train a critical eye on life and times (the COVID-19 days). The poems present slices of contemporary urban existence, peeling the gloss off things to expose the darkness within, “If you visit me, you’re welcome/ to relay love signals from white flowers./ But please tell them to be able/ to penetrate your smile, and my/ unbearable silence” (“If you visit me”), be it the mind-numbing culture of enslavement of power, “When edifices, tall, medium or short/ are razed to the ground, a sense of/ eerie equality brings uncontrolled/ joy, satisfaction./ And the leader takes pride in crushing all/ sensibilities and unwanted eyes” (“Saplings”), or the ringing hollowness of mundane life. Straight lines are flat and boring./ They lie along, as if in deep and smooth/ slumber all the time,/ like indifferent runways. As if, without any dreams” (“Confusions”).
