Icelight

In pristine, conversational language shot through with sharp imagery and a meditative sense of life’s key questions, award-winning Indian poet/critic Hoskote examines who we are (it’s “what we’ve lost”), where we are (“Let me tell you/ why you’re here”), our search for self (“the valley into which/ you’re rappelling// is you”), and our momentous efforts to express ourselves (his breath “leaving me to catch up/ halting and ranging in its wake/ calling out to it by every name/ I have waited all my life to speak”). If loss figures largely in his ponderings (“What we’ve lost/ reclaims us”), so does the future. One poem muses on paths to take (“Have I stood here before??”), while elsewhere a man clambering up a mountain peak clutching a contracted earth “[gazes]/ down steep slopes to the promised land.” And if “Paishachi” looks back to speak of theories about a successor language to Sanskit that literally translates as the “language of ghosts,” “Apostle” examines Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s sense of the visiting Isaiah Berlin as a “guest from the future.” Throughout, readers will feel forever on the verge.