LAST winter, the Lahore-born poet Imtiaz Dharker consolidated her reputation as a mainstream British poet with her powerful and moving sixth collection, Over The Moon, which won her the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. The award, which was established in 1934 for Commonwealth writers, has been given to eminent poets ranging from Robert Graves and Derek Walcott to Ted Hughes and Fleur Adcock, but Dharker is the first recipient of South Asian origin.

Over the Moon is a spellbinding work, dedicated to Dharker’s late husband, Simon Powell, with the words “not because you died, but how you live”. Her collection is a poetic communication with him in which absence and memory are enriched and intertwined by an interplay of music, light and sound to convey both life and loss and worlds beyond the corporeal: Powell permeates the book as an ever-present, beloved, living spirit. Dharker grew up in Glasgow, with a strong awareness of Pakistan which she visited with her family and later spent several years in Bombay. Her book begins with a sequence rooted in Dharker’s subcontinental heritage and the cultural symbiosis so intrinsic to her poetry, and indeed her sense of self. ‘Taal’ captures the movements of time through the whirling imagery of music and dance.

The cycle begins

with one and ends with one

dha dhin dhin dha. There must be

other feet in step with us, an underbeat,

a voice that keeps count, not yours not mine.

The music is playing us.

We are playing with time.

In ‘Bomil, Bumla, Bummalo’ the very title creates a rhythmic interplay of words used for that famous fish known in English as Bombay Duck. This deceptive name and the joys of cooking and eating this delicacy are intrinsic to the memory of two friends, Powell and the poet Arun Kolatkar enjoying the dish in Bombay’s Ballard café where the imagery of mirrors reinforces a sense of illusion and absence. In the lyrical ‘Hiraeth, Old Bombay’ the poet imagines the moments she would have liked to have shared with her husband in the erstwhile Naz Café with “the best view and the worst food in town”. In Dharker’s poems Mumbai is a cultural melting pot, created by an interchange between Britain and India. In the light-hearted ‘Mumbai? Kissmiss?’ she creates lively images and puns through the linguistic inaccuracies of ‘Indian-English’:

Of course! Who is not knowing this?

that after Happy Diwali comes Happy Kissmiss!

Impossible to miss when allovermumbai

Matharpacady to A to Z Market, rooftops

are dancing in chorus.

However, most of the poems are in set in Britain including Wales to which Powell belonged, and Scotland where Dharker’s family lived. In ‘Alan or David or John’, ‘Ghazals on the Grundig, Pingling in Pollockshields’ and ‘In Wales, wanting to be Italian’ she looks back at the unreal, romantic dreams of adolescence. These poems are juxtaposed in-between those which consider the unexpected cruelties of fate. In ‘Rapt’, a peregrine falcon’s aerial view of London, the city that Dharker and Powell made their home, conjures up vividly a predatory bird surveying her domain swooping down on its prey “the feathered body in her beak/its heart still beating”.

Several poems tell of solitary journeys and a sense of limbo. Death and sorrow are ever-present in poems such as ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ which is replete with references to darkness, tunnels and a train rushing by; while ‘True’ contemplates the different shades of blue in Paul Cezanne’s ‘The Bathers’ and missing details of real life. ‘Christmas Eve on the Number 4’ describes a mundane trip on a bus past silent cathedral bells, where there are neither choirs of angels, nor gifts of frankincense and myrrh, provides an engagement with the Christian concept of salvation.

Dharker frequently asserts the bonds that she and her husband shared. ‘A hundred and one’ is a rare and unusual love song: she creates images of him as he might have been in old age, wearing bedroom slippers and cardigans, smoking a pipe, eating burnt toast and jam and she leads up to the desperate plea “Sit on the sofa watching telly/till you are at least one hundred and one/or two or three./Be very old with me.”

Dharker’s lyrical and poignant poems provide a nuanced quiet interplay with words but at the heart of the collection is a powerful and moving sequence which describes her husband’s struggle against cancer and his last days. In ‘Stab’ her grief and anger emerges in the staccato words: “Stab the page. Stab it in the heart./Find the word that is not a word./Find the word that is a blade.” ‘You Said Something I did not Understand’ tells of her husband in hospital, “the unfamiliar bed/a prison, your body behind bars/your bright spirit locked away”. ‘Vigil’ describes him tied to a machine, as she watches over him until its signals stop: “I try to read its face./The machine is blinking back/its tears”. She goes on to write of his funeral in ‘After’ and the sense of unreality. In ‘The Other Side of Silence’ images of grass, a broken eggshell and rain heighten the sadness and emptiness. In ‘Threshold’ Dharker provides an intertextual engagement with the Laila-Majnu legend to portray her grief:

In the wilderness, Majnu

tears at his rags, lifts

his torn voice

against the booming

sky to shout

I am here, I am waiting

She continues with the Laila-Majnu in ‘Ephemereal’ where the lightening advises the mad, heart-broken Majnu “Here take this stick and write/and he is writing, writing in the sand”. In ‘Palimpset’ she considers “How to live again, when all the finished words/have been scraped off to leave the parchment clean”. Gradually the poems go on to look back at her memories. ‘I Swear’ celebrates the life and laughter the couple shared; in ‘Litter’ and ‘Say His Name’ she leaves grieving behind because she can bring her absent beloved closer to her by saying his name often and talking about him. Ultimately Over the Moon moves beyond sorrow and leads up to the ringing of London bells, the miracle of a newborn child in the family, a new life and a new generation bearing the name of the man who left a space to be filled.

In this spectacular collection — certainly Dharker’s best — she encapsulates a myriad of intensely personal emotions with re­markable skill and control and gives her poems a further context by her black and white illustrations which accompany her words.

Over the Moon

(POETRY)

By Imtiaz Dharker

Bloodaxe Books, UK

ISBN 978-1780371207

160pp.