Breathless verses

When I look back at the year’s reading, I notice the many new voices — because poetry is a voice, isn’t it, in all its cadences? — who widen the fore by ascending to it. I notice the returning poets, who ask to be seen for new work in a new world. But more than anything else, I notice the voices are no longer speaking anyone’s language but their own. In its first week, the year awarded the TS Eliot Prize to a poet who represented, for many, poetry’s status quo. Whereas the previous year’s winner had been persistently critiqued for being female, of Asian origin, and her looks, this year’s winner was allowed to speak about his work on his own terms. It was a troubling start.

In the final week, I am astonished at how much the line-up has changed. In When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities , Chen Chen writes beautifully of a queer childhood and coming-of-age as the son of Chinese immigrants in America. The lines “I am making my loneliness small. So small it fits on a postcard a baby rabbit could eat” are a small sampling of his power as a poet. In Louder Than Hearts , Zeina Hashem Beck praises and mourns the Arab world in a way that has never been seen before. She says, “Spare me/ this Arab love for conspiracy tonight. Lower your voice/ to the sound of my pupils. Look at me. Let’s music/ instead, let’s cigarette, let’s wine and laughter.” In The Cowherd’s Son , Rajiv Mohabir traces a colonial history of Indians forced into indentured labour, remembers his grandmother’s Bhojpuri songs, and writes of his own identity as a queer immigrant. In a poem that recalls his family’s numerous migrations, he says, “Ma ta,/ I have left again across the sea/ you’d never dream was mapped, I am/ even further from India than you.” In Call a Wolf a Wolf , Kaveh Akbar gathers poems he wrote in the months and years after his recovery from addiction. In ‘Learning to Pray’, he watches his Iranian-American father kneel on a janamaz , and says, “I hardly knew anything yet —/ not the boiling point of water/ or the capital of Iran,/ not the five pillars of Islam/ or the Verse of the Sword —/ I knew only that I wanted to be like him,/ that twilit stripe of father/ mesmerizing as the bluewhite Iznik tile/ hanging in our kitchen, worshipped/ as the long faultless tongue of God.”

In Telepathologies , Cortney Lamar Charleston’s poems about the reality of being a black man in America are anger skilfully wrought into dissenting forces to be reckoned with. In a few short words he powerfully brings home the large-scale incarceration and execution of black men in America, “Some say the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice./ I say the whiter the jury, the tighter the noose.” He turns that unsparing gaze on the home in ‘How Do You Raise a Black Child?’, where he says, “Without a daddy at all, or with a daddy in prison, or at home,/ or in a different home.”

“I have been standing by water my whole life/ waiting to be saved,” writes Tiana Clark in Equilibrium . She has won more awards for her poems than I can list here, and hers was the book I opened over and over in 2017. She opens the collection with a poem that admits and declares in the beginning, “Took me thirty years to say/ I am glad I don’t pass for white.” At the close of the poem, she asks herself, “What is left/ whispering in us once we have/ stopped trying/ to be the other?” In my mind, her question is to all other poets who are still uncovering their voices. In the poems that follow, a narrative emerges of a young black girl trying to straighten her hair, of a daughter of a single mother with three jobs, of being married to a man whose family chooses an old slave plantation as the location for a photo, and of being called the n-word.

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Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas is the sort of book that continually slaps one awake. She writes of the colonised body, land and language as a Native American woman. But her work, in its breadth and force, is essential reading for anyone anywhere in a world where the process of decolonisation appears deceptively complete. Whereas is my favourite book of the year for startling and amazing me. No matter how many times I read a sentence, I was astonished every time. Though Sherman Alexie’s memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is largely prose, the poems in which he remembers his difficult, brilliant mother, who lived her whole life on a Native American reservation, is reason enough to pick up a copy.

Belfast’s Sinead Morrissey won the Forward Prize for Poetry for On Balance , where she revisits human feats of engineering, historical moments that tipped the balance, and the balance that has yet to be reached in society. She opens with a poem called ‘The Millihelen’ — a unit of measurement — the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. She masterfully shames Philip Larkins for equating dullness with happiness in women in a poem where she says, “I wouldn’t let you near/ my brilliant daughter –/ so far, in fact, from dull,/ that radiant, incandescent/ are as shadows on the landscape/ after staring at the sun.”

Penguin Modern Poets , anthologies containing the work of three contemporary poets, brought forth three editions in 2017, with anthologies 4 and 6 bearing mention for phenomenal work from Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson, Nick Laird, Claudia Rankine, Denise Riley and Maggie Nelson. Emily Berry’s long-awaited second collection, Stranger, Baby , is a tender, moving response to the loss of her mother that simultaneously attempts to look intellectually at loss.

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Three Indian women poets returned with second collections, which had been years in the making. Anindita Sengupta’s Walk Like Monsters is a careful collection of precise images that make visceral the most mundane and the most devastating of experiences. Her impact is immediate and inescapable as she says, “Morning comes with a neighbour’s hacking cough, water rattling into a bucket,/ the sounds of another day to be lived.”

Sharanya Manivannan’s The Altar of The Only World is a consuming amalgamation of the concerns and comforts of Sita, Lucifer, and Inanna (a Sumerian goddess of fertility). In a poem where Hanuman pries open his chest, she says, “The god in me saw the god/ in you. Our demons/ saw each other too.”

Nitoo Das’s Cyborg Proverbs is an immersive world of travel, birds, foliage, photography, and seeing and listening closely. In two powerful images from the book, she says, “You taught us/…/ how herons can be sunburnt,” and “Jesus-like, a cormorant sits/ in surrender: wet, alone,/ meditative.” Tishani Doshi’s Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is a record of female fear and menace, of sea abode and sea decay, and of the fragility of the body. In the titular poem, she sings a determined, desperate anthem for women who have long occupied, sought shelter and grown teeth in the forests on the outskirts of power, where, she says, “Girls are/ coming out of the woods, lifting their broken legs high, leaking secrets from unfastened thighs, all the lies/ whispered by strangers and swimming/ coaches.”

FIVE , an innovative project which brought together chapbooks by five contemporary poets, is an intriguing gathering where Arjun Rajendran looks at the first Indian-American to be sentenced to death in the US, Manjiri Indurkar looks closely at a fraught relationship with a grandmother, Mihir Vatsa examines the absences that open up in one’s early and mid-twenties, Usha Akella turns canonical poems on their head, and Nandini Dhar revisits the middle-class Bengali Hindu.

Début Indian voices that must be mentioned include Linda Ashok’s Whorelight , Uttaran Das Gupta’s Visceral Metropolis , and Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadings . Biswamit Dwibedy wrote one of the year’s most innovative collections with Ancient Guest .

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Loss compelled the poetry world to remember the work of two of India’s finest poets. It is difficult to memorialise a woman with a parrot on her shoulder, so I will turn to one of her poems where Eunice de Souza says, “It’s time to find a place/ to be silent with each other,/ I have prattled endlessly/ in staff-rooms, corridors, restaurants./ When you’re not around/ I carry on conversations in my head./ Even this poem/ has forty-eight words too many.” Of Vijay Nambisan’s unforgettable lines, I will share one which goes, “Desperate with knowledge, opened wide by drink,/ How I’ve thrown my need about the houses/ I’ve partied in.”

We can only hope collected works and posthumous collections will follow.

What a breathless year for poetry 2017 has been. And in the new year, we will have Jayanta Mahapatra’s Collected Poems, Subhashini Kaligotla’s Bird of the Indian Subcontinent, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Oceanic, Sohini Basak’s We Live in the Newness of Small Differences and also Akhil Katyal’s chapbook to look forward to.

Urvashi Bahugunais a poet living in Delhi

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