Review of Mrinali C. Clarke, the ever-transcending quest: a literary analysis of the poetry of Sri Chinmoy (D. K. Printworld, 2015)

This slim volume is an excellent and engaging gateway into the poetry of Sri Chinmoy , who is better known as a spiritual teacher and philosopher who innovatively used the arts and athletics to convey a message of peace and transformation.He wrote thousands of poems in both English and Bengali, but so far secondary works on this extensive corpus are few.Clarke's book is thus a welcome contribution.The interpretive and organizing structure of "the quest," she says, emerged naturally as she read through Sri Chinmoy's voluminous poetic oeuvre and her study demonstrates the validity of this approach.In her introduction Clarke connects Sri Chinmoy to a tradition of poets writing in English on spiritual themes, including George Herbert, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, as well as the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.She identifies as central questions concerning Sri Chinmoy's poetry the problem of giving words to the ineffable and how the most marked formal feature of Sri Chinmoy's poemstheir brevity and highly condensed mode of expressionis intrinsically related to their content.Clarke helpfully calls this brevity a "distilled" quality, in which each word bears concentrated meaning while the poetry still appears simple.This mode of expression is deliberately designed by the poet to bypass the discursive mind and directly reach intuition and "the heart," which figures prominently in his philosophy.In the next three chapters Clarke discusses how Sri Chinmoy's poetry portrays the human journey to the Divine.