There is an effortless levity in Mamang Dai’s words. In many ways, her poems, while containing enchanting inner worlds, also contain the feeling of an intimate, personal feeling of “home” – and the many things that compose that word and the associated emotions. Even in the unforgiving bite of an unreasonable winter, The White Shirts of Summer warmed me with the promise and possibility of language, and carried me patiently through seasons, into the “folded silence of the hills.”

WH Auden famously wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but one only needs to read any poem from this collection to know the incredible power of poetry to carry emotions that evade us, from love to grief and most of all, the incomprehensible business of everydayness. The title poem of the collection, for example, is like a meditation exercise. In this excerpt, for instance, see how Dai writes so charmingly about how the fingers of the sun caress, carry and confirm the warmth of distant times and spaces:

Rivers of sand, grey mountains of the sea.
When moments vanish,
a finger of sun touches my face
closing the distance.
Salt white, oracle blue,
an ocean deep throws a wave,
knocking the boats in our hearts.
Forever, and forever –
radiant, the white shirts of summer.

An all-encompassing spectrum of emotions

Countless times, these poems left me with a strange feeling. An oxymoronic feeling, at once warm and cold, sweet and bitter, and melancholic and uplifting. And perhaps that’s why the collection appealed to me, in its all-encompassing spectrum of emotions. Dai’s recurring motifs through the poems are these emotions, but also these strong emotions rooted in ordinary events and places. So often we forget that Place itself is a living thing. Dai patiently inscribes the land she calls home in her verse, not only in an attempt to pause and take account of the spectacle but also to immortalise it by recording its presence. In “The Oasis is A Memory of Rain,” she writes:

Sometimes
beads of water float on the horizon.
The land is a master of disguise:
A burial place.
A mirage.
A resurrection.

Poetry, perhaps like photography, is a rebellious, silent project that captures the world around us at a certain moment. It slows down time and steals from its agile passing a fragment for its own. Dai’s poems are lush with these fragments, as she manages to write about a moment stolen from the continuum, allowing the reader to process their own sense of time with breathable wisdom. For instance, this breathtaking line from a poem, “In Memoriam”:

Time is a narrative of finding words, losing them,
to find them again in another place,
waiting with the wind and stars in the mountains where we were born…

Love and more

One of my favourite poems from the collection, however, is about love. Or the more lasting form of love: loss. In “Green Jacket,” Dai writes from a child’s perspective, about a father who has lost his wife. He continues to wear the green jacket he wore “since the day he stood on the tarmac / and waved goodbye to mum / on her way to hospital.” Even after a year, as the warm sun blazes and the “lilies are turning towards the sun.” The poem tells us, because “his hands are hidden / pockets bulging with love.” How we hold on to that which we have lost – in closed fists – and continue to remember, against the passing of seasons… That too must be a superpower we possess. A superpower that perhaps is always contesting with the forces of the universe which remind us to move on and forget.

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There is another immensely charming poem after Gabo [Gabriel García Márquez]. Interspersed with references from almond trees to levitation, such a clever and beautiful ode to one of the finest writers to have ever lived! Poems about the pandemic, the misery and the madness of those times, written in a somewhat truncated verse – as it is appropriate for those times. But most of all, these are poems about the small furies and big anguishes (interchangeably) of our hearts, punctuated by moments of brief and yet lasting sense of simply and tenderly being together in this world.

The White Shirts of Summer: New and Selected Poems, Mamang Dai, Speaking Tiger Books.