Lantana Strangling Ixora
by Sasenarine Persaud
Toronto, ON: TSAR, 2011
78 pp. $18
Redemption Rain
by Jennifer Rahim
Toronto, ON: TSAR, 2011
112 pp. $18
The challenge for the intellectual poet is to be accessible without becoming mystical or sentimental. A Guyanese-Canadian resident in Florida, Sasenarine Persaud is dauntlessly brainy, a fact that makes his eighth poetry collection, Lantana Strangling Ixora, a bit like reading T.S. Eliot mixed up with Rabindranath Tagore – two Nobel Laureates, yes (which is an endorsement of Persaud), but they are also notoriously difficult and abstract.
Jennifer Rahim’s fourth collection, Redemption Rain, is more immediately clear than is some of Persaud’s work, but also moves between and among worlds so fluidly that one can be mystified about just where the Trinidadian-Canadian is locating herself—in Toronto, or Trinidad, or Haiti or elsewhere.
Persaud’s lyrics are said to be “as much about love and people in and out of relationships as it is about origins and the process of estrangement.†These notes are helpful: Persaud is disturbed by neo-colonial encroachment that resembles that of the lantana – a South American creeper – that can engulf other plants, such as the transplanted, Indian ixora. But his “love†is airy-fairy.
Persaud attempts to bear witness to the erasure of Indian culture and thought and heritage in the Americas – and in the West in general. To this end, he sees “place as muse†and engages in witty and scornful excoriation of Indians and Westerners who forget or deny India’s cultural contributions to humanity, who prefer to acknowledge “‘Papa’ [Hemingway] … travelling in the hills of Africa / or [Pearl] Buck … observing the Chinese.â€
Finding “A yoga studio†in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the speaker and his interlocutor recall the imperialism of Christopher Columbus and the roots of Thanksgiving as a de facto peace pact between Puritan settlers and the Natives who helped them survive. The dislocation of an Indian cultural practice to a place where First Nations were confused with India(ns) is central to the irony of the poem, but one needs a background in history to see it.
If you don’t get Persaud’s subtlety, or his deep understanding of the subterranean connections among politics, history, and culture(s), you may feel lost, no matter how lofty the verbal transport. One literary debate that Persaud returns to frequently is the argument between two Caribbean-born Nobel Laureates in literature, namely Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul, over the proper attitude toward British colonization. In one poem, Persaud seems to say, “a plague on both your houses,†but in another he seems to prefer Naipaul’s British Indianness to Walcott’s Greco-Roman Africanness. Persaud’s poems are unapologetically learned. If you want to “get†his erudition, you’d best “bring it†– i.e. an education.
Jennifer Rahim’s Redemption Rain is, in contrast, invitingly and overtly lyrical. One proof of her reader-friendly simplicity is that her previous collection, Approaching Sabbaths (2009), received Cuba’s 2010 Casa de las Americas Prize for best book in the category of Caribbean literature in English or Creole. Even so, Rahim also challenges a reader to keep up with the deft movements of her almost whimsical poems.
See “Earthquake 2010,†a meditation on the Haitian disaster, but also on personal ramifications and aftershocks that the poet experiences as a Trinidadian-Canadian. So, when tremors strike Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, the speaker is being questioned by a Canadian border agent in Toronto: “When tectonic plates, / began secretly negotiating / their catastrophic shift, / the officer was asking, / ‘How much did you pay / for your candy, miss?’â€
The point is made that the questioning, perhaps reflecting a subtle racial harassment, is a minor, small-mind-perpetrated shock in comparison with the actual earthquake unfolding with deadly force in the Caribbean. Arriving at Kipling subway station in Toronto, Rahim’s persona recalls “the injurious [British] poet / whose verses pined for ‘Home,’†and reflects, “Heaven … is a location.â€
The shuttling back and forth between Haiti’s tragedy and the poet’s T.O. homecoming is an odyssey of sorts. Yet, the fine reflection of most of the poem is not served by the rhetorical conclusion: “If poetry means anything, / let this be a mouth charged / like Jeremiah’s call to build / with much more resolve / the temple we too dimly / dream ourselves.â€
Hi Professor Clarke,
It’s been a long time since Modern Canadian Poetry! I wanted to ask you a question about your opening line- perhaps it’s more about defining mystical and intellectual from a poetic perspective-
How do you define the poetry of Rumi, Hafez and other sufi poets? They defy the ‘intellectual’ term– would you call them ‘mystical’ or ‘sentimental’- or are they accessible enough to not be defined as either ‘intellectual’ or ‘mystical’, despite being rooted in a mystical tradition?
Hope you’re doing really well!