Besides Anne Carson’s other celebrated works, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos is one of the most fascinating series of poems written in English in modern times. Although Carson’s work is characterised by the blending of forms and features across genres, it remains circumscribed by a consciousness that comes with a deep involvement — not simply a brush — with the classics. From Carson to Rachel Rose, Canada offers a diverse range of compelling poets who need to be read and appreciated by Pakistanis interested in contemporary and modern verse. The accessibility of Canadian poetry, however, is not at the cost of its complexity.

Perhaps it was mere coincidence that just after having revelled in The Beauty of the Husband, I got to read another Canadian poet. A Garden Enclosed is a series of poems written in love of the wife, and they are not fictional. This book is an extended elegy written by poet Blaine Marchand for his beloved wife, Kathleen, and was published 10 years before Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband. Kathleen was diagnosed with a terminal illness and the couple went through the phases of anger, denial, reckoning and grief that you feel when death knocks suddenly at your door.

Marchand shares the experience of a time that never passed even after the poet had made sense of that bereavement as part of his healing process. A Garden Enclosed also reminds one of Taufiq Rafat’s Poems for a Younger Brother, a heart-wrenching series of elegiac poems. We continue to ask ourselves if such wounds ever heal. The irrevocability of the death of a loved one is so astounding that, for some of us, breath is never fully recovered. Marchand confesses that “grief is not easy to uproot.” The book closes with these lines: “… the way bees brush the golden plumes/ inscribe the purple scroll/ as they leave/ the crocus named Remembrance.”

Marchand’s depiction of his life and the world around him is woven around a tight, umbilical bond that connects him with nature and natural environs. He has a particular fondness for flowers, roots, leaves, fruits, rain, wet earth, etc as metaphors as well as plain, simple entities cherishing their own selves with an obvious confidence in the face of the hard realities of existence. He finds separations hardest to deal with. Therefore it seems that he decides not to separate from whatever he adores even if the object of his adoration is not tangibly present any more. He challenges this modernistic, pragmatic, worldly and alienating notion of ‘moving on’ after one has experienced certain times, seasons, relationships or events. His chapbook that came out last year, My Head, Filled with Pakistan, is another example of a sequence of time staying with him forever.

Marchand has written about his time in Pakistan and Afghanistan before as well which can be found in several other collections of his verse. But this particular chapbook of 12 poems and a few photographs is a testimony to his love for a country and its inhabitants, sights and sounds, flora and fauna, dreams and aspirations. Those few years he spent in Pakistan during the previous decade cast an indelible impression on Marchand’s mind and soul. He made friends with hills and rivulets, marigolds and chrysanthemums, cumin and pepper, poets and writers. They succeed in pulling him back to this land every few years. Here are some lines from his poem ‘Etched Memories’: “Festering, as if cadavers pecked by vultures/ headless, as if severed by swerve of sword/ these Buddhas huddle in thick barred rooms/ where centuries ago monks’ feet trod lightly/ their mantra inflected, rain against stone.”

In these isolating and troubled times for Pakistan, Marchand’s is a reassuring voice coming from a distant land.

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad. His collection of essays Crimson Papers: Reflections on Struggle, Suffering, and Creativity in Pakistan was recently published by Oxford University Press

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 18th, 2017