Book Review

No Rhododendron (a reference to his country’s national flower) is an intoxicating mix of ancestry, revolution, and familial affection, making for an impressive debut from the Nepalese born poet Samyak Shertok. The poems—some brutal, some beautiful, some unbearably nightmarish—are so full of echoes, allusions, and digressive flourishes they are difficult to categorize; but what is constant here is that they are all underpainted with an almost lyrical quality which either tempers or heightens the content depending on the subject addressed.

A particularly fine example is the title poem’s portrayal of restrictions and casual cruelties foisted on its citizens in the time of Nepal’s civil war. Imagine, if you can, strangers entering a village through the rain, slaughtering livestock, burning books, plucking prayer bells from the lintel, paralyzing the people:

We couldn’t tell whether they were Those-Who-Make-You-Disappear or Those-Who-Walk-at-Night.

/

They said No red scarves. They said No pointing at the stars. They said No rhododendron.

I’m reluctant to quote from some of the more savage incidents here, but you’ll have an idea at least of the mental torment, if not the physical horrors, inflicted in the name of an ideology. It’s hard going, but so skillfully put together and so relevant that it’s impossible to ignore.

Equally unsettling is the bare twenty-eight-point checklist of advice that makes up the poem “In a Time of Revolution.” I’ll pick out just a few examples to illustrate the burden of survival in such an atmosphere of uncertainty: “Practice praying still”, “Never draw the curtains when there’s still light”, “When you hear coming from a window We’ve a letter for you from your apa, keep walking”, and perhaps most ominous of all, “When someone asks you where you live, point at the neighbor’s house.” The poet has a knack, evident in other poems here, of stepping from subtlety in to the white light of reality to get to the very heart of things. This alarming inventory concludes with the cryptic, but affecting lines:

The year the war ended, I swallowed nine bodhi seeds and left my fatherland.

Yam between two boulders. Vultures. Fatherless—Oh bereft my fatherland!

Away from such fearful specters, from another planet almost, comes “A Blessing.” I’m always a little ambivalent as to the merits, or otherwise, of the prose poem as a legitimate form, but among several examples here this undoubtedly justifies its inclusion. It’s a fine piece, charming in its simplicity, colorful in its telling, and as poetic a poem about food as I’ve come across. Opening with a gloriously descriptive recipe for pumpkin blossom lamb curry—what the cook refers to as his “‘monk’s half-moon’” dish—it progresses to the meal being served up to the eager diners around the fire (including larger portions placed at the edge of the hearth reserved, as is traditional, for absent friends and family). The narrator, greedily anticipating each and every mouthful, can’t but help to rhapsodize over:

. . . cliff-forged flesh, aged smoke,

foraged fragrance, rain-honeyed dark, earthed moonmilk,

petrichor pistils, salt, butter gossip of the butterflies, fire

of the fireflies, summer, sweet summer, sweet impossible summer—

After some pretty grueling fare up to this point, the poem is indeed a blessing.

Within this collection, Shertok displays his inventiveness with form (although I could have done without the quirky interventions scattered throughout), drawing on traditional poetics to supplement the unforced discipline of his own structural ideas. In a remarkable series of sonnets, for example, under the heading “A Sky Burial,” he embarks on what seems like a stream of consciousness memory of a dead and dying father, replete with touching personal detail and spiritual awareness. Not easy to read in their fractured, shape-shifting complexity, the whole is nevertheless a significant achievement. It’s necessary only to absorb the love felt for a man, for a tradition, and for a world fast receding.

A poem which perhaps illustrates best the dexterity of the poet, but also in a way defines the very essence of a large part of this collection, is “Harvest of the Revolution.” We see boys picking up armfuls of spent cartridges (the blooded ones will later be washed by their sisters) each of which “weighs about a rhododendron blooming in the dark somewhere up north.” Their hands reek of sulfur, so it’s necessary to eat their curry and rice with forks. They laugh, they clown around, they sell their harvest to what they refer to as the “jackals.” But these youngsters, sitting around, talking like old men as they order milk popsicles, have, it would seem, already squandered something they can ill afford to lose.

And just as that poem impressed with its dreadful simplicity, it was the pure lyricism of “The Last Himalayan Beekeeper” which attracted my attention. It’s a touching tale of—and poignant lament for—a mother who would gather honey bareheaded, confidently not taking juniper smoke to the hives, just song. For the mother who never got stung, who fed her son raw honey from her palm throughout his last summer with her. But now, memory and melancholia combine to conjure an idea of his Ama who:

. . . plucks stingers from my tongue

with her nails. Each barb she binds

to her lock, and her crown grows

more thorns than rhododendron.

Which, by any standard, is a striking image. It’s a fine poem, although I’m still pondering the meaning of: “a home is one blossom / and a thousand stings.” But even such enigmatic aphorisms contribute to the overall atmosphere of these poems which I’ve tried to convey in quoting the few examples space allows.

There is much to admire in Shertok’s work, not least his ability to recreate a sense of, and feeling for, a country and way of life he so obviously treasures, but is also concerned for. The esoteric nature of the customs and rituals, the courage and humor of its people, the landscape of fear, and the evident love of family are presented with verve and originality, making this assured first collection a most satisfying, if difficult, read.