The travel poems of Basu's second collection of poems titled "Puri Series", published in the sixties, represent some of his best work which bring out the spirit of the Bohemian suspended in a thoughtfulness that has evoked much interest amongst scholars and young poets of the later generations. Some identify the presence of a neo-realistic search algorithm. The search for a heterotopic cross-cultural flux. Utpal Basu often achieves this through the unsentimentality and witty documentation of his travel journals. Others have noted the interplay of folk-culture, demographical and statistical elements that seem to accentuate his postmodern aura.

Utpal Kumar Basu met Allen Ginsberg in Kolkata in the early sixties and shared a great friendship with the fiesty poet. Basu sided with the Hungryalist poets in the early sixties and gave up a decent teaching job at a state college in Kolkata refusing to sign an apology for his association with the Hungryalists. The Hungryalist poets were written about in a 1964 issue of Time Magazine. Having lost his job, Basu took a trip to England, France and other Eurasian countries in the late sixties working part-time jobs and travelling incessantly. His poetry took a temporary pause but the experience gathered shaped his much talked about nomadic style.

A handful of Basu's poems, signatorial of his style, are presented here.

Selected Poems :: Utpal Kumar Basu

Puri Series - 1

The sky is blue now. I rest
On the seashades like Arjun trees.
With loads of cigarette tins the rusty leaves,
With sand and torn newspapers
With the waving soulfuls
Veiled rallies of millions
These blue waves.
O’ widowed white lacklustre, the gulls
You discard from the prison of sunshine
Its sequence of bars
Through the bars you drop them on the
Yearning forests of garlanded ridges
My brain, addiction, consciousness
My mausoleum
All in the hands of
Nuns and monsignors now.

Puri Series - 4

Take note, these beaches have been used to excess.
If you’ll notice, the smooth iron cage is now rough from sandrub.
Once it was far fancier than the cockatoo.
The ancient linguist obsessed with double meanings was more garrulous
You almost mistake him for an ultra-modern and
Every house on the beach feels habitable –
Children don’t play with sand castles like ivory tusks.
They have grown. They don’t expect from their kids anymore.
Termites feed on pages of arithmetic. But the waves
return all of what you gave them. The sea’s unreasonable
prestige – that’s all.

Puri Series - 8

Lets go back to the coastal suburbs. Cheap, delicate
country of vegetables. Sit in the tree shade and think about it.
Your pointer can take us further than that. Hold the child’s
pointer and pull him farther, even to the draughtland of the year,
acute famine, revolting unemployment, lets mingle in the
crowd of politicians who have the farmer on the chopping block.
We have little time to spare, moreover, the more we let it pass
it dwarfs. Lets jump on to ride it, else it’ll continue
to diminish into stupidity, into oblivion. When riding a dwarf,
don’t ask how to analyze a poem. Enjoy this country of
cheap and delicate vegetables, eat well, make merry,
detectives aren’t eyeing you. Just try to make some room
for poetry, at least it is good to know if these are
useful and habitable. Maybe you could edit the fish
in this coastal suburb. I need the horse.

A Portrait of Nature (1963)

I write these letters for illiterate  prostitutes in this desolate ’63,
Mariam, in your garden, in your cottonyard, the god-sent donkey
strolls alone, these  illiterate prostitutes, I write letters for them
without old-fashioned landlords and their  middlemen beside the
dense grove in this desolate ’63 is anyone peeking at my irrisible
reading game, this tense self-doubt, are you sure Mariam it is not
understood at this dawn when I can hear the swan by the window
stream,  it pecks  at  its own  feathers  comparing with  my white
shawl, the god-sent  donkey still  grazing in the cottonyard and my
feet getting caught up in the lightning vines, in a wink I notice the
feces of a lower god in the woods.

Last poem of this collection

Next, your private spring slippers resting in the grassy woods. and
the sky is as real as the blue shirt and pajamas god's children wear.
Only a lonesome peacock in the second floor. That used to be Sajal's room.
The room of Sajal's daughter and his wife. They've left, crossing over the rice-mill.
Now spring returning to these unpotential hills and woods an advancing spring
In the unpromising river-bay, two men still searching copper and mica
You've lost your private slippers in these nuthills.
You've lost your personal oeuvre in these nuthills.

Translated from Bengali by Aryanil Mukherjee.

Utpal Kumar Basu's photograph: copyright Kaurab