(North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2020)
Not unlike the shimmering ghazals of Agha Shahid Ali, the poems by Adeeba Shahid Talukder embody a “leaping” quality, an ability to shift surprisingly from one keen observation to another, always landing on her feet. She achieves this legerdemain by adhering to exquisite craft—nothing in excess. All is spare and exact in Sahir-E-Jaanaan: the City of the Beloved. Immediately, we’re confronted with a “beloved.” Is this a romantic reference or a sacred one? Perhaps the poet wants the reader to explore this and other dichotomies, and to reconcile them as suffering has taught her to do.
The quality of her writing, regardless of denotation, swirls deliriously into our eyes, breath, and brains. This attribute is attained by a rigorous use of language. One can almost feel the words’ delicate tendrils drawing us in. Talukder writes, “if the wounds are blooming, / the roses will too.” Indeed, this is instructive, for no one gets through life without pain, but not everyone manages to transform a laceration into a blossom. The assonance of “wounds,” “blooming” and “too” creates a rhythm, a stream, if you will, that carries the reader along. Another transformation of human suffering happens in these lines, from “Crossing Manhattan Bridge,” “Beads of light, / the curve of the rosary / the sky bleeding stains of henna.”
Delving further into a spiritual quandary, Talukder writes,
All candles fell quiet.
The beloved hung on dry branches, /
perfumed, silvering.
There was
no god.
In all the sky,
there was no God.
The “beloved” returns, but the lines are no more revealing. We are left dangling between what might refer to a pagan god versus a monotheistic one. In both cases, an erasure occurs. These lines derive energy from a philosophical tone and by the attentive use of verbs. They do the poems’ heavy lifting, giving the poems heft and solidity, despite how spare the lines appear to be. Here’s another example of the struggle with human anguish, given energy by the use of specific verbs:
Under the heart’s flaming core we sat
picking needles
when we could have plucked
stars from the sky.
Talukder’s lines move the reader through time and experience. She invites us to share her secrets, as in the poem, “After eating her letter.” The final lines are, “Its blue / glides down.” This act performed by a secret beloved (?) brings to mind a poem by Sor Juana, where she eats a letter. Thus, the narrator hides all evidence and also becomes one with the paper. Finally, the “blue gliding down” demonstrates a kind synaesthesia, a device heralded by Emily Dickinson. That Talukder seems to embrace the work of other female poets follows a narrative that emerges. One senses an ongoing disagreement between generations, between mother and daughter. The poet is exposing sexism when she hears, “You’re getting older, and there are such few boys.” Later, the poet writes,
After his visit, my uncle
told Ammi I had been erratic
with my eyeliner. She came
to fix it. I knew, then
I had fallen.
The speaker explores a feminist voice. She rebels in order to find her own self, borne of pain. In “On Beauty,” the poet recalls being seen as Other, as exotic, as someone towards whom assumptions are made. Of all the dichotomies that this collection investigates, living between two cultures offers the richest material. Yet it proffers no simplistic, easy response. This poet is too wise for that. She tells us:
When I was 19, I trembled
to meet men’s eyes.
Scarf, burqa, black
eyeliner. I was more
than Muslim,
more than beautiful,
more than sexual.
They wanted to know
what they could not
see.
She continues with one of the leaps alluded to earlier:
The cruel beloved of Urdu
poetry slays her lovers
with glances [.]
The capitalized word “God” finally returns in a Plath-like poem, titled “God-shaped Woman”:
What it is to dusk
her neck, its gleaming
sun. To be a slave:
the pull of light,
the chain’s idle
bind. She draws
you into a tale—
she is thin, a slight
curve, and cannot
move to infinity.
But the poet’s peregrination moves on. In her journey, the Beloved shapes the contour of healing and beauty:
in the smoke of altars
we shape you.
you are barely
there. each day they fell
you with a wave
before our very eyes.
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Dean Kostos’s memoir, The Boy Who Listened to Paintings was published in October, 2019. It is a finalist for the Foreword Indie Awards. His eighth collection—Pierced by Night-Colored Threads—was released in 2017. His previous collection—This Is Not a Skyscraper—won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, selected by Mark Doty. Kostos is the author of the previous collections: Rivering, Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma (which was required reading at Duke University), and Celestial Rust. He edited Pomegranate Seeds; its debut reading was held at the UN. His poems, personal essays, and reviews have appeared in The Bangalore Review (India), Barrow Street, Boulevard, Chelsea, Cimarron Review, Mediterranean Poetry (Sweden), New Madrid, Southwest Review, Stand Magazine (UK), Western Humanities Review, on Oprah Winfrey’s website Oxygen.com, the Harvard UP website, and elsewhere.
He has taught poetry writing at the Gallatin School of New York University, The Columbia Scholastic Press Association, The City University of New York, and Wesleyan. Also, a recipient of a Yaddo fellowship, he has served as literary judge for Columbia University’s Gold Crown Awards. He received a Rockefeller Innovation grant.