‘Field Notes on Kindness’: Ankush Banerjee’s poems probe how men relearn the languages of empathy

Tenderness overflows, filling the reader’s mind with the perfection of craft and the delicacy of affect. Ankush Banerjee’s Field Notes on Kindness opens with a line from Eavan Boland: “An art is lost when it no longer knows / how to teach a sorrow to speak.” The quotation is uncannily apt. Banerjee’s poetics insist on finding verbal nuances for muted sorrows, on giving tensile shape to the fluidity of what ordinarily remains unspoken in the chinks of family, illness, war, and the fragile scaffolding of everyday care. The poems offer not a sentimental vocabulary of kindness but a meticulous, sometimes forensic, exploration of how tenderness is explored, offered, unexpressed, withheld, or remembered across time. It is in this sense that the poet becomes, as Shobhana Kumar observes, an “archaeologist of memory”.

Memory as an archaeological site

In Banerjee’s universe, memory behaves exactly like an archaeological site: layered, sedimented, and resistant to linear recovery. The poems often move simultaneously across past, present, and anticipated futures, a temporality reminiscent of Mary Oliver’s meditative shifts between what is seen and what is endured, or Eavan Boland’s insistence that domestic histories carry the weight of national and emotional inheritance. Yet Banerjee’s voice is unmistakably his own – quieter, more interior, unabashed, yet sharpened by a clinician’s attention to detail.

“Contours of Affection”, one of the most striking early poems, exemplifies this interplay of restraint and emotional acuity. It dwells on a mother’s unnoticed labour, illuminating the “ordinariness of pain, of hurt, of bone-deep disappointments / which will eventually heal / our only link to each other”. The lines echo Philip Larkin’s moral unease about familial duty, yet Banerjee offers instead a gentler, more phenomenological account of how care is constituted in repeated gestures – small, habitual, often invisible. This was always one of my favourite pieces, which stitches together affection and tenderness that explore the delicate cartographies of love and empathy. However, the poet understands with clarity and compassion, “But you know, expecting/massages to assuage grief, or pedicures to erase neglect / is like flying kites to scrape rain off sky’s roof”.

Here, kindness is not an abstract moral category but something embodied, “bone-deep,” inscribed into the textures of daily life. This grounding in material gestures pays attention to the seemingly ordinary things like laundry, streets, and domestic thresholds as sites of persistent emotional labour. Banerjee extends this lineage, but with a masculinity-inflected introspection: the poems probe how men learn, fail to learn, or desperately attempt to relearn the languages of empathy.

His research in masculinity studies surfaces repeatedly, though never didactically. Poems such as “Some Boys”, “Indian Soldier’s Rucksack”, “Kargil”, and “The Uncertain History of Good Men” examine how vulnerability is disciplined, disguised, or weaponised in male experience. Men-making happens in academies and distinct male spaces, and the portraits the poet paints are neither accusatory nor absolving; instead, they create a sociological yet intimate record of what it means to inhabit a male body shaped by cultural scripts of gender like stoicism, duty, desire, and silence. One might think here of Ilya Kaminsky’s explorations of war-bound tenderness, but Banerjee’s attention is directed inward, toward the emotional afterlives of men who must reconcile public roles with private fractures.

Constituting the world through memory

If the collection’s first half leans toward biography – mothers, grandmothers, soldiers, friends – the second half moves toward epistemological questions about how we constitute the world through memory. Poems such as “Field Notes on Retrieving Lost Things”, “Reclaiming the Memory Fox”, and “Preparing for Another Life” enter the phenomenology of loss: the mind’s attempt to catalogue, classify, and preserve what is always slipping away. These are not merely recollections but acts of thinking about memory, how it folds and unfolds, how forgetting shadows the very desire to remember.

This is where Banerjee’s poetics resonate strongly with skeins of memory retrieved as a cultural artefact and, at times, healing narratives. Banerjee often writes a memory the way one might brush dust off a relic: designed to reveal, but also careful not to disturb the fragile surface of what remains.

In “Homecoming”, the tension between return and estrangement is distilled into brief, luminous images. The poem does not offer closure; instead, it opens into a state of “sukha” and after-burn – emotional states that appear repeatedly in the collection. Indeed, the poet excels at capturing what might be called transitional emotions: the sedimented tremors between grief and calm, fatigue and resilience, intimacy and distance.

A recurring motif in Field Notes on Kindness is the body – its betrayals, its slow repairs, its intimate knowledge of injury. “If the Body Betrays” and “80 Per Cent Burns” wrestle with corporeality not as metaphor but as lived history, echoing Marie Howe’s corporeal lyricism, where the body becomes the first archive of memory. Banerjee writes these bodily inscriptions with a clinical precision tempered by tenderness, a balance visible in small syntactic turns and careful enjambments.

At times, the poems operate like field notes in the literal sense—observational, documentary, almost ethnographic. This quality aligns him with contemporary Indian poets such as Annie Zaidi, whose work often blends journalism and lyricism; Arundhathi Subramaniam, whose poems move between mythic and embodied consciousness; and Nitoo Das, whose sharp observational frames turn everyday objects into subversive metaphors. Mani Rao’s sensorial lyricism is another nearby aesthetic kinship; indeed, Rao’s endorsement of the book identifies Banerjee’s attention to “wonder and detail” as a defining quality.

Despite its thematic seriousness, the collection contains an undercurrent of humour, wryness, and self-reflexivity. ‘Superhero’, ‘Blue’, and ‘Poet Caesar’ exhibit the poet’s ability to turn irony and self-awareness into emotional texture rather than deflection. They gesture toward the comic limits of attempting to be a “good man,” a “good poet,” or even a “good witness” in a world saturated with pain. This is where Banerjee lets his wit modulate the heaviness of existential inquiry.

One of the book’s strongest poems, “To Flesh a Poem”, can be read as an ars poetica for the collection. The poem suggests that writing is itself an act of stitching flesh – tender, careful, and always partly insufficient. This mirrors Boland’s belief that poetry restores the body to history, as well as the argument that agency often occurs in the quieter, embodied practices of endurance rather than in dramatic acts.

Banerjee’s poem “On Why the Subaltern Can Speak, But Doesn’t” extends this theoretical conversation explicitly. Drawing from Spivak but refusing a purely academic register, the poem imagines silence not as absence but as ethical weight. It asks what it means to speak on behalf of others, to inherit pain that may not belong to us, and to gesture toward histories that elude articulation.

Among the collection’s most moving pieces are those about grandmothers – “Grandmothers”, “Grandmother Won’t Be the Last”, “Righteous Among the Nations” – poems steeped in intergenerational witnessing. Banerjee manages to acknowledge nostalgia without succumbing to it, presenting women not as archetypes of sacrifice but as complex figures whose gestures, imprints, and absences continue to shape the present. A recurring strength of the collection is Banerjee’s capacity to create atmosphere through sensory detail. He writes landscapes – domestic, emotional, or geographic – with an intimacy that draws the reader into the poet’s perceptual field. The poems function almost as topographies of feeling: rivers braided with memory, streets thick with emotional residue, skies that hold the faintest tremors of war or longing.

The closing poems – “Some Friendships”, “Reunion”, “Good Hope”, and the titular “Field Notes on Kindness” – return to the question with which the book implicitly begins: what does kindness look like amidst the fraying textures of contemporary life? Banerjee does not idealise kindness; instead, he places it within a ledger of small, precarious acts – an offered hand, a shared cigarette, a forgiveness that arrives too late or not at all. In Banerjee’s poems, kindness is not redemption; it is a practice, a form of ethical attention, a way of insisting on intimacy even when the world refuses to make space for it.

Field Notes on Kindness is, ultimately, a book about the endurance of tenderness in a time when tenderness is in short supply. It is a cartography of quiet gestures, a record of how affection survives in the cracks of daily difficulty. The poems never claim to resolve the contradictions of care, masculinity, or memory; rather, they dwell in the complexity of those contradictions.

This is what positions the book as a significant contribution to contemporary Indian poetry: its refusal to sensationalise suffering, its insistence on nuance, and its commitment to examining the emotional labour that undergirds ordinary relationships. Banerjee’s language is spare but resonant, often luminous, and always attentive to how human connections both falter and persist. In a moment when public discourse is increasingly polarised and harsh, Field Notes on Kindness reminds us that poetry remains one of the few forms capable of holding contradiction without collapse. It is a book that teaches sorrow to speak – not loudly, but with quiet, unflinching honesty.

Babitha Marina Justin is a poet, artist, and academic whose body of work spans ten books, numerous poems, scholarly writings, and curated exhibitions.

Field Notes on Kindness: Poems, Ankush Banerjee, Red River Press.