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English
Jeet
Thayil
Size/
Binding: 6 X 9; 96pp / CD Included
ISBN: 1-892494-59-0 (paperback)-- $12.00
LCCN: 2003096867
Audience: Adult General.
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Jeet
Thayil is the author of English (Penguin/Rattapallax
2004). He was born in India and educated in Hongkong,
New York, and Bombay. In 1998 he returned to New York
where he received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
His poems have appeared in Stand, Verse, Fulcrum,
7 Carmine, Agenda, and London Magazine. He
lives in New York City where he works as an editor and
writer.
Photo
credit: Konstantino Hatzisarros
Learn
more about the book "English"
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Synopsis
The
narrator in these poems abandons the sectarian histories
of 1990s’ Bombay for the relative calm of New York,
only to find himself a witness to September 11, 2001.
In the faux prologue poem ‘About the Author’, he stands
‘on Sixth, watching ruin, with a handful of rain and
a prophecy’, a citizen of no country except the republic
that gives the book its title. English here is more
than language—it is a metaphor for divinity, and it
holds a hard-won tenderness for all things living. Jeet
Thayil’s second full-length collection links images
of water, addiction and forgiveness; poems that evoke
multiple outsider perspectives are set in landscapes
as various as Hong Kong, Doune (Scotland), Pashupatinath
(Nepal), Bombay, and, always, New York City.
“Jeet
Thayil’s work is, quite simply, the genuine article.
I shake, vigorously, his hand.” -- Thomas Lux
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Comments
About Jeet Thayil
“I
revel in Jeet Thayil's poetry. He seems to be one of
the most contemporary writers I know, and contemporary
precisely because he has such command of the poetic
and historical past, and because his invented language
has such depth, archeological richness, and reality.
The staying power here and the imaginative strength,
which allows the soul to be forever balanced on the
cusp of the inner and outer worlds, are nothing short
of remarkable.” -- Vijay Seshadri
“Thayil’s
poems refract his vibrant, unique and far-flung life
experience through the prism of a tremendous lyric intellect.
The result is a fantastic realism that will haunt me
forever. Thayil’s English first spices a transcendent
command of diverse registers of literary and colloquial
speech with certain sprung local talk, but then melts
all that into an infinitely focused and inventive, personal
and emotional idiolect, delivered in one of the most
unforgettable voices of our time. He is a master of
the knockout lyric punchline. Some of his poems made
me cry, which is rare.” -- Philip Nikolayev
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American
Book Review
March - April 2005
Excerpts
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
By Bruce King
English
deserves attention and could be one of the better
books you will read this year.
When
English arrived I glanced at some of the poems
and was struck by the powerful language, range of dictions,
shifts in personae, conciseness of expression, and toughness
of the verse. The poems moved rapidly, were musical,
and the volume appeared structured around varied themes
and images. Some poems were difficult, even obscure,
with tightly complex syntax. A thickly textured, many
layered volume, it would require study. Each time I
put the book away, I eventually came back to it.
English
is structured as a metaphor of life as a journey of
both body and soul. It moves from places, through poems
on transformations, then spiritual discomforts, to a
central section of philosophizing and myth-making, then
reverses the journey outward through various complaints,
metamorphoses, and places, this time with more understanding.
Although the poems allude to many mythologies, the notion
of a fall from paradise into the mutable world shapes
the vision. While Heaven and Hell are neighbors and
appear alive, the speaker celebrates regeneration.
The
blue-tinted photograph of a snowy Brooklyn Bridge on
the cover is alluded to in 'Skewed,' one of the New
York poems in the first part of the book, when in winter
the speaker mocks himself with "I am ready as ever
I will be/ for America, or I will be ready once I/ get
myself a hat" and notes "the city is skewed,
sweetly,/ for those who see the skyline or bridge/ in
this poem's wavy right hand margin." The early
part of the book is mostly about immigration, and there
are rapid shifts in focus from an Asian past to the
present, especially a post 9/11 New York: "I'm
standing on Sixth, watching ruin." 'It Wasn't Until
the Lawyer Told Me' contrasts the drugged-like (and
sometimes drugged) condition of the recent immigrant
with the sharp awakening when learning of the laws that
will shape behavior and feelings ("I could not
leave… I was/ struck so deep by the notion of home/
lost, I could barely breathe or sleep or dream").
Thayil avoids describing 9/11, but the event influences
the poems as part of a "winter" that is both
real and emotional.
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English
is a state of mind, a part of globalization, existing
everywhere and nowhere at home, even the divine. Needing
to acculturate to many customs, the speaker has memories
of home and the past. But what is home? The journey
back and forth between continents is part of a larger
ethnic and family diaspora. Behind the poems is the
notion of Adam in Eden, the memory of our first home,
which has been lost. Born into the ancient Syrian Christian
minority in Kerala in southern India, Thayil lived in
New York for some years when his father worked at the
United Nations. He also lived in Hong Kong, where his
father founded an English language weekly, and
Thayil himself was the literary editor of a monthly
in Bombay. In recent years he has lived and worked in
New York. Poems allude to these and other stages of
his life as the speaker's journeys include Nepal, Kerala,
and England. 'Doune,' Scotland, offers a kind of paradise:
blank, absent, without meaning
a landscape untouched
by history or memory,
a place whose weather
matches his own.
It
would be wrong to regard English as another volume
of immigrant or postcolonial lament or a reflection
of recent globalization. Thayil is after bigger game,
a myth in which his own condition is placed within history,
family, earlier diasporas, the temptations of drugs,
and other aspects of consciousness, including the desire
to forget: there is a renewed sense of religion and
the holiness of nature. English deserves attention
and could be one of the better books you will read this
year.
Download
copy of this review (PDF)
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Skewed
I
am on a street, already somewhere --
say downtown, say Perry and Hudson,
where Hart Crane lived for a summer
and Dylan Thomas fell, as if into sleep.
I am poor. I am no tourist. I am hitching
my cargos past the angular bones in my hip.
I wear a black and white scarf at my throat,
folded not knotted, my coat buttoned up,
and I know I am ready as ever I will be
for America, or I will be ready once I
get myself a hat, it being winter and all.
I walk stiff-legged toward Christopher St.,
see too many blocks between 10th and 11th,
and find that the city is skewed, sweetly,
for those who see the skyline or bridge
in this poem's wavy right hand margin.
My regenerate heart pumps like a bird,
floating on auto, ever unwilling to land.
The Boredom Artist
Life,
said Hobbes, is nasty, brutish and short.
He left out boring, as grim a condition as any.
His tigerish namesake's epiphany,
in 20-point captions, is a Sunday slot.
Then there's Chekhov, who, a moment ago, wrote,
The
earth is beautiful, as are all God's creatures,
only one thing is not beautiful, and that is us.
Between philosopher, toy tiger, doctor, there's
a ladder of land no man claims as his.
I'll settle down there with old friends, familiars:
a
monkey, my famous barking birds in pairs,
and defrocked Sukhvinder, the bald brahmin bear.
Dawn, like whiskey, half-lights a watery world:
all things break down to flesh, food and fear.
It's late December in Fleetwood, downstate NY,
"glorious
showers, thunderclouds continue".
My mind unwinds as the century slows,
dribbles its years to a whining close
and defunct days peddle the news.
Listen: nothing, not even love, is true.
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September
10, 2001
How
much harder it is to speak
when I have spent the whole day silent.
I would like to stop someone,
leave my room in the evening
and stop someone, a man without hope,
or a woman bent double, as if she were
searching the sidewalk for gems
caught in the cracks, and I would tell her
that each of us walks with the same
impossible burden, knowing
that only the stars will last --
she will listen to me, hear what I say
and go on her way, bent over as before,
never looking up at the approaching sky.
Elegiac
for
Dom Moraes
We
shake hands; yours are paper.
You tell of desecrated cities.
In the inner temple, blood-
brimmed bowls tremble at each
blow. On fine stalks of fear
your eyes
walk among drowned paddies,
boy pilots, breakfast whiskey, flak.
Stories whir like flies,
only one remains untold:
how
can death be not useless?
why stain the air with grief
of my own, when so much hope
persists? Priests and monkeys
chatter like static; it
sifts the fine lines that halo
your head. Ash heaves
upward. Bones fall, fill
the river, fat its oiled banks.
Your good eye sees soot
stain
the sky. You salute
our awkward leave-taking.
I tried, you say,
but not enough, take
my hands and hold them,
bless me as I bless you.
Your hands
are mine. We hold a cup of air.
I drink the word 'holy' -- I pray
a way to pay it forward.
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