Poet and Critic Gopal Lahiri from Kolkata, India reviews Radha Chakravarty’s In Your Eyes A River (Hawakal, 2025), calling the collection full of discerning and solipsistic poems.
- ISBN:978-93-49541-65
- Publisher: Hawakal Publishers Private Limited.
- Year of Publication: December, 2025.
- Price: Rs 600/-
In her latest collection of poems titled ‘In Your Eyes A River’, Radha Chakravarty intimately chronicles the present that is fragmented, a restricted, fenced off past which she details with a sharp eye and an unambiguous sensibility. Poetry serves her as an offering to the past, a form of expiation, a hope for redemption. Her powerful capacity to identify with which she observes in daily life gives her work a distinct edge compared to other contemporary poets.
There are sixty odd poems in all in this collection which include a group of subtle poems. Each poem has its own mark and threshold. Some poems begin in the past and stay there while others begin in the present and turn to the past. This also gives additional poignancy to her love poems as well. The poet believes, ‘Love/a tethered boat/tossed between/ safety of sore/and thrill of the open sea.’. (Love)
What is striking is the intensity of her poetry , her Dickinsonian pulses, her fierce determination to pierce the superfluous shimmering surfaces of the modern world bringing a visual sensibility in her writings and penetrate the core of reality itself. Sometimes her poetry has a strange, agitated beauty and reticence gives way under the extreme pressure of emotion with an eerie stoicism. Her poems are often crafty, profound and intensive. Her effort is to make her poems out of the process, the quest.