‘Icelight’: The future is hauntingly, haltingly present in Ranjit Hoskote’s new book of poetry

In Ranjit Hoskote’s new collection of poetry, Icelight, he is withdrawing from us. That is not good news. But where is he withdrawing to? The answer to that question is enough reason to read this book.

The moment I started reading the poems, I was reminded of two films. Poems are meant to provoke associations. We read poetry to discover languages and worlds that are not the poet’s alone. I thought of Abbas Kiarostami’s last film, 24 Frames (2017). Each segment of that silent film is on the disappearance of species-life, often outside our windows. The other film that came to mind was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), where three characters navigate through a giant wreckage of a place with fumbling footsteps and voices.

Memory, an overlapping world

Hoskote’s poems are laden with slow discoveries. Take a poem like “Miramar” (dedicated to Vivek Menezes). It begins:

Watch that shape
as it stretches itself into moon,
cloud, tunnel, between worlds,
trail of ash-blue leaves.

When you read it at first, the poem is enveloped in a fog of meaning. When you read it again, the fog begins to lift and you see the landscape being described, more clearly. Visibility must be earned when you read Hoskote. His craft is laced with alchemical properties. Only the reader’s intimacy can melt the words that reveal the poem. It is difficult to decipher whether style moves intention, or vice-versa. The poet, or writer, too may not know.

In the poem, “Spur”, Hoskote throws up a sudden image of childhood,

Am I a boy
who climbed this spur
and laid claim
to the scrubland sweating 
in its shade?

With Rilkean delicacy, the poem whispers that memory is an overlapping world, where poet and reader merge. The poet’s memory reveals we are connected by similar impulses of being. I paused on the poem, “Breath”. To turn breath into memory, to write the memory of breath, is a delicate task. To take a breath, be short of it, hold it, and wait with bated breath convey the trembling of our being. Paul Celan connected the definition of poetry itself to “an Atemwende, a turning of our breath”, in his famous speech on poetry, The Meridian, delivered in 1960.

Running through the maze of language, trying to catch his breath, Hoskote realises: “I have waited all my life to speak”. Poetry is a matter of breath. Language is always rushing ahead of us, overwhelming us with words. Sleep, that necessary pause, doesn’t help either. It feeds us with dreamful images we struggle to find words for. Between breathing and dreaming, we desperately seek that moment when breath translates into words where we can name ourselves and life.

I would like to connect the poem “Bed” to the innate connection between memory and breath. The poem begins by telling us, where once stood a bed, there now stands a boat. The ground of memory is water. It ends with the lines: “We are / what we’ve lost”. We have lost uncountable breaths through the tides of life that return as memory.

The book unearths the ravaged poetry of earth. In “Witness”, Hoskote writes:

Speak Earth,
in consolations of dewbud and darkening ray 
turning into coal and slate in the cold mineshaft
where I laid my hand.

It is time for Earth to tell us how we ruthlessly executed the fate of our evanescence. The history of advancing geological decay speaks through some of the poems. In “Departures”:

What if the bat practising a dive behind the shuttered windows
of the Natural History section
could ask the elephant grazing in the parched scrubland
her name…

In “Dust”:

Our trees grew sour and blanched as their mistimed fruit.
The sun’s slightest
breath would melt the ice
our glasses.

In “Roar”:

Roar now or never
as we enter the garden of last lines
In this closing act
recall the shattered mountains

In “Return”:

Open your eyes
to this rain that’s here to stay 
Centuries from now hurtling through space
this planet will host nightfog and dayhaze
on screens where once our lamplit faces
had flickered until they’d grown too hard to love.

In these poems, the vast noise of depleted earth cries out in whimpering silence. The poet witnesses the disappearance of his world, his own disappearance. There are visions that trouble the blood.

Not just natural but cultural history bears the brunt of destruction. Both are stamped by the disturbing imprint of the human. In “Wind”, Hoskote writes:

I sang the stories of all I’d lost
when those marble shadows marched across
wide forests with fire and spade
when they choked lakes.

“In This Country of Silence” Hoskote writes: “In this country of silence / soldiers are burning newspapers…” and goes ahead to write:

In this country of exile 
charred wisps of newspapers float across the river…the jars in every small brim with strawberry juice
and this tongue’s gone dry
waiting for refugee songs to return.

The images of memory

The poet subtly hints at the destruction of childhood, not just his own. The metaphor of a choked lake conveys the inability of the throat to gulp down the sight of water. A lake is a natural place made artificial, a mark of neighbourhood, and intimate memory. People in uniform bury the news by burning it. The silence of natural destruction echoes the human, and that is what makes it political. The silence is political. Poetry must either fall silent or speak this politics of destruction if it has to bear witness to its own history.

It is impossible at this juncture to not be reminded of WG Sebald. In Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (1999), he sets out to do what can be called an archaeological excavation of (cultural) memory, both personal and collective. His precursor, Walter Benjamin, outlined the role of an archaeologist of memory as a method to study the history of that period (in an essay titled “Excavation and Memory”). It introduced a new way to study history in and of a devastating time. Sebald investigates the psychological impact of war pausing over a constellation of sites and works of literature that help survivors recollect and make sense of their trauma.

Even collective silence gets divided into two camps, those complicit in the violence, and those who survived, lingering shadows of guilt on both sides. In After Nature (1988), Sebald takes to a form of verse-in-prose to recount details of a shadowy past of war through the work of Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, and the 18th-century naturalist, travel writer, and Arctic explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller, apart from his own biography. Landscape mirrors the wounds of history in Sebald, like this:

Tell me, child,
is your heart as heavy as
mine is, year after year 
a pebble bank raised
by the waves of the sea
all the way to the North, 
every stone a dead soul
and this sky so grey?

Hoskote’s poems are full of photographic images drawn from memory. “Call If You’re Lost” is a poem drawn from “after-images of Cartier-Bresson”. It begins: “Rainbows are born / in broken windows”. The images are so porously described, your eyes can move through them like through a glass pane, and you get sucked in like the keen artist watching Van Gogh’s painting in a gallery, suddenly transported into the canvas in a marvellously-real segment titled, “Crows” in Akira Kurosawa’s film, Dreams (1990). There is a “Crow Hymn” in Hoskote’s collection, which ends by asking: “These storms in which you sing black-feathered hymns / in what scorched and strangled voices?” Crows, the accursed bird of mythologies, bear a negative responsibility, to forewarn us of imminent doom. The imagistic poems in the collection also reminded me of Roland Barthes’ bleak observation in Camera Lucida (1980) that “the age of the Photograph is also the age…of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.”

Human beings are caught in the ironic role of photographers, clicking the natural stage of their own death. Hoskote also makes allusions to paintings in his poems. He mentions in a conversation, the first poem of the collection, “Tacet”, which refers to the silence or pause in a musical composition, has images drawn from a painting. The poem introduces the disturbing tone to the collection, where the human body wonders in pensive anguish if it is “the barometer” of impending doom. Hoskote invokes the future in the ripped heart of our ecological and historical present. The idea of the future is reflected in the image of the present. If that present is out of our hands, someone is painting the history of our destruction. The study of natural history through cultural memory opens up the discipline to the deeply subjective world of a writer, or poet.

Hoskote is an archeologist of memory. He lives in a time, unlike Sebald in the postwar years when memory can no longer ignore the future. The poet warns that the future of memory is in danger. The future is hauntingly, haltingly present in Hoskote’s poetry. It is in the vortex of this future-present that Hoskote is withdrawing from us. But since we are experiencing this ecological disintegration together, Hoskote, by sharing with us an intimate history of his poetic observation of reality, is drawing even closer to us.

A poet must be kind to human life, and leave us with hope. In his poems, hope comes from the other fragile album of memory where brief images and encounters of light appear. In “Bookmark” dedicated to “Amma”, a poem beautifully alluding to a ghazal, the poet remembers “your notes in the margins / of your Keats”, and her last question about parrots. In “Glover”, dedicated to his friend, Sukhada Tatke, the poet writes:

From passion’s flayed hide the glover trims
silhouettes of regret. She reaches out. Her gloves touch
his hands, which had once held everything
and let it go.

These poems reminded me of another postwar poet, Czeslaw Milosz. In a poem written in 1953, “A Notebook: Bon by Lake Leman”, Milosz writes:

Whoever finds order,
Peace, and an eternal moment in what is
Passes without trace. Do you agree then
To abolish what is, and take from movement
The eternal moment as a gleam
On the current of a black river? Yes.

Hoskote’s poems seek Milosz’s “eternal moment” of light in the dark.

Icelight, Ranjit Hoskote, Penguin India.