Praise for Water & Wave
With the uncanny clarity of the born observer, Eugene Datta, standing at the site of a martyr's death in Ganderbal, Kashmir, recalls how "An old woman / sobbed without tears as oblong drops / of the mustard field shone through holes in her earlobes." Or he is in a coffee shop in Jadavpur, West Bengal, recalling his student days there, "and the lost faces wrapped / in that damp smell of the south wind in spring / (which made the heart twinge, / without fail, / in that one special way / that couldn't be named)." What becomes clear, as Datta moves fluidly across boundaries of countries and cultures, and his own past and present, is that he is an extraordinary writer-cosmopolitan, erudite, achingly lyrical. His poems remind me of why I came to poetry in the first place.
- George Bilgere
From delicate haiku-like miniatures in which "thoughts lie white / on the black filigree / of branches," to "January 2022," a poem wide-ranging enough to encompass simultaneous global disasters, Eugene Datta knows that to imagine pain "isn't equal to suffering it." Even so, the poet's ability to comprehend-that is, to both understand and hold close all that he observes-is lovingly confirmed in poems whose agile language serves a deeper purpose: to acknowledge, with empathy, the shadows and light of worlds both seen and unseen. Throughout Water & Wave, Datta's vision is distinguished by a meditative openness that wisely asks, "if you can receive as a mirror / does, without effort, without bias, / everything in front of it, / ...who can tell / if you haven't, for that instant, for all / your flaws, been a bodhisattva?" In the light of such poems, Eugene Datta's benevolent intelligence shines.
- Ned Balbo
