Poetry review – LEGION OF LOST LETTERS: Antoinette Moses admires Debasish Lahiri’s poems of isolation and exile
Legion of Lost Letters
Debasish Lahiri
The Black Spring Press Group
ISBN 978-1-915406-42-2
£11.99
Dramatic monologues which position men and women within a landscape make two demands of the poet: they have to bring the characters to life and also find a way to illuminate the landscape through the characters. In his fifth book of poems, published last year, the Indian poet Debasish Lahiri succeeds magnificently on both counts. Legion of Lost Letters contains twelve dramatic monologues voiced by men (and one woman) who find themselves in Britain at the time of the Roman Empire or who comment on the period. The one exception is a lament by the poet Ovid, exiled to present-day Constanta in Romania, on the Black Sea coast.
Employing landscape as a portal to history is a trope often used in fiction, particularly that written for children; and one of the best in this field is Susan Cooper. In the final volume of her The Dark is Rising sequence, set at the Roman fort of Caerleon – the location of Lahiri’s most poignant poem – she uses nostalgia as a pathway through time, as do many of these poems. Robert Macfarlane, who acknowledges her influence on his own books, notes that in the work of writers such as Cooper: ‘places carry auras and memories; they act both archivally and prophetically Landscape is a palimpsest upon which ancient stories are both contested and renewed’ (The Guardian 3 December 2022). Lahiri’s imaginative sequence of poems enacts this precisely.
The sense of being part of a colonial empire, while not belonging to it, is a relationship that links both the poet and his characters even when it is not explicitly stated. Rome is the centre of their world, yet they cannot live there. Indeed, the pain of exile and nostalgia weave through the narratives and we can share Lahiri’s own homesickness while in this cold country. The book begins with “Ovid Contemplates writing his Fasti at Tomis”. Fasti was the sequence of poems that Ovid was writing prior to his exile, but this poem is much more a companion to Ovid’s Tristia, sharing his pain of exile, hatred of the cold weather and longing for Rome. Or indeed India; the heat of the homeland is frequently evoked.
Lahiri’s Ovid complains that:
Here no shuttle of nectarine branches on a summer loom
weaves a curtain round love’s bower,
and, in another narrative, Martinaus Hostilius writes home to Rome to an ‘orange scented villa’, the sensuality of the warm homeland contrasting with Ovid’s terse: ‘No trees grow here.’ In Colchester, the newly-widowed Virgilia remembers a day when the rain was warm and reminded her of home. The cold of Albion/Britain is a repeated feature. The mountains are ‘armed with wind’ and ‘play games with the snow’; York is a ‘town of refrigerated autumn’; the young sculptor, Rufinius, is ‘chased by winter winds/through the night.’ Throughout, there is a longing for warmer weather; the young legionnaire, Quintus Flammius (burning with his passion, perhaps) is initially happy that his love affair has ‘brought summer’ to the hearts of his fellow soldiers ‘despite the rant/of the cold breeze.’
It is not only the weather which these narrators find hard to bear – the different cultures run through the monologues like bright thread on a dull background. In what feels like the most personal of the poems, “At Deva”, we meet Kanad, the boy comes with the Emperor and his elephants. Deva is a fort which is ‘a broken neck of rock’ where the Roman soldiers are waiting for their arrival. Kanad, ‘the dark one’ is able to communicate with the elephants and, contrary to what they believe of him, he is not an African:
His mother had a five-petalled flower blooming
between her brows,
and her hair smelt of the anemone
that grew by the river.
She was called Swati.
Kanad had stowed away to be with the elephants and is renamed Canadus, ‘strewn across salt and sand/of time and geography.’ He is the poet’s ‘indivisible man.’
Many languages like the knots in Kanad’s hair
that can scarce be untangled, only shaved away,
hold Kanad steadily on history’s rocking boat,
sliding, barely holding on.”
Time and history flow through these verses juxtaposing what is visible and what is lost. One of the most powerful and moving monologues is “The Sycamore Gap”, which has a new poignancy since the tree itself has been vandalised and cut down. It is also the longest poem in the book, giving it time to develop as a narrative, with the arc of a short story and ending with the tree as a witness ‘to so much sadness’.
There is much sadness here. Like Lahiri’s Ovid who casts himself as ‘a reed of memory:/ my every breath a semi-tone of time’, the sculptor, Rufinius, find that ‘Time has still left me/ with the power to count my misfortunes.’
Recorded history can also be misleading. The final two poems, “Wayside Notes: Peddar’s Way” and “York Upended” play with this. The first includes a joke about the path’s Celtic connections: ‘I thought I was in Wexford county’. (The Peddar’s Way was created by the Romans after the defeat of the Iceni who inhabited much of what is now the central area of Norfolk.) This poem also touches on what maps miss when all they show is what is visible in the present.
The paths have been well beaten
by time, in time,
for trudges and loiterings,
tagged and directed by a cartouche
that is all point and no suggestion.
Above all, these lost letters encapsulate the pain of exile as felt over the ages: ‘The soldiers must have felt solitary too / Finding oneself always is.’ The anguish is faultlessly summarised in “At Caerleon: Camp” which acts as a description of the book as a whole:
Would that not be a going home?
All rivers end in the sea. don’t they? –
Not all rivers.
Some only seek the sea.
Antoinette Moses taught creative writing at the University of East Anglia for ten years and is now working on a book on refugees and exile. Her latest book of poetry Take Pandora for Example: Poems for Crete was published by Black Crane Press in 2023.
Aug 24 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Debasish Lahiri
Poetry review – LEGION OF LOST LETTERS: Antoinette Moses admires Debasish Lahiri’s poems of isolation and exile
Dramatic monologues which position men and women within a landscape make two demands of the poet: they have to bring the characters to life and also find a way to illuminate the landscape through the characters. In his fifth book of poems, published last year, the Indian poet Debasish Lahiri succeeds magnificently on both counts. Legion of Lost Letters contains twelve dramatic monologues voiced by men (and one woman) who find themselves in Britain at the time of the Roman Empire or who comment on the period. The one exception is a lament by the poet Ovid, exiled to present-day Constanta in Romania, on the Black Sea coast.
Employing landscape as a portal to history is a trope often used in fiction, particularly that written for children; and one of the best in this field is Susan Cooper. In the final volume of her The Dark is Rising sequence, set at the Roman fort of Caerleon – the location of Lahiri’s most poignant poem – she uses nostalgia as a pathway through time, as do many of these poems. Robert Macfarlane, who acknowledges her influence on his own books, notes that in the work of writers such as Cooper: ‘places carry auras and memories; they act both archivally and prophetically Landscape is a palimpsest upon which ancient stories are both contested and renewed’ (The Guardian 3 December 2022). Lahiri’s imaginative sequence of poems enacts this precisely.
The sense of being part of a colonial empire, while not belonging to it, is a relationship that links both the poet and his characters even when it is not explicitly stated. Rome is the centre of their world, yet they cannot live there. Indeed, the pain of exile and nostalgia weave through the narratives and we can share Lahiri’s own homesickness while in this cold country. The book begins with “Ovid Contemplates writing his Fasti at Tomis”. Fasti was the sequence of poems that Ovid was writing prior to his exile, but this poem is much more a companion to Ovid’s Tristia, sharing his pain of exile, hatred of the cold weather and longing for Rome. Or indeed India; the heat of the homeland is frequently evoked.
Lahiri’s Ovid complains that:
and, in another narrative, Martinaus Hostilius writes home to Rome to an ‘orange scented villa’, the sensuality of the warm homeland contrasting with Ovid’s terse: ‘No trees grow here.’ In Colchester, the newly-widowed Virgilia remembers a day when the rain was warm and reminded her of home. The cold of Albion/Britain is a repeated feature. The mountains are ‘armed with wind’ and ‘play games with the snow’; York is a ‘town of refrigerated autumn’; the young sculptor, Rufinius, is ‘chased by winter winds/through the night.’ Throughout, there is a longing for warmer weather; the young legionnaire, Quintus Flammius (burning with his passion, perhaps) is initially happy that his love affair has ‘brought summer’ to the hearts of his fellow soldiers ‘despite the rant/of the cold breeze.’
It is not only the weather which these narrators find hard to bear – the different cultures run through the monologues like bright thread on a dull background. In what feels like the most personal of the poems, “At Deva”, we meet Kanad, the boy comes with the Emperor and his elephants. Deva is a fort which is ‘a broken neck of rock’ where the Roman soldiers are waiting for their arrival. Kanad, ‘the dark one’ is able to communicate with the elephants and, contrary to what they believe of him, he is not an African:
Kanad had stowed away to be with the elephants and is renamed Canadus, ‘strewn across salt and sand/of time and geography.’ He is the poet’s ‘indivisible man.’
Time and history flow through these verses juxtaposing what is visible and what is lost. One of the most powerful and moving monologues is “The Sycamore Gap”, which has a new poignancy since the tree itself has been vandalised and cut down. It is also the longest poem in the book, giving it time to develop as a narrative, with the arc of a short story and ending with the tree as a witness ‘to so much sadness’.
There is much sadness here. Like Lahiri’s Ovid who casts himself as ‘a reed of memory:/ my every breath a semi-tone of time’, the sculptor, Rufinius, find that ‘Time has still left me/ with the power to count my misfortunes.’
Recorded history can also be misleading. The final two poems, “Wayside Notes: Peddar’s Way” and “York Upended” play with this. The first includes a joke about the path’s Celtic connections: ‘I thought I was in Wexford county’. (The Peddar’s Way was created by the Romans after the defeat of the Iceni who inhabited much of what is now the central area of Norfolk.) This poem also touches on what maps miss when all they show is what is visible in the present.
Above all, these lost letters encapsulate the pain of exile as felt over the ages: ‘The soldiers must have felt solitary too / Finding oneself always is.’ The anguish is faultlessly summarised in “At Caerleon: Camp” which acts as a description of the book as a whole:
Antoinette Moses taught creative writing at the University of East Anglia for ten years and is now working on a book on refugees and exile. Her latest book of poetry Take Pandora for Example: Poems for Crete was published by Black Crane Press in 2023.