Ranjit Hoskote, Icelight

 

STILL LIFE WITH ORANGES

As boats shear pastthrough the pearl-grey haze
our eyes widen to grasp abowl of oranges.

The prism of this momentsacrifices more
than flesh, pips and rindat the hour’s altar.

Each fruit bursts invariants of bright:
shine, glow, gleam and atinge

of hope. To this bonfirewe feed
our strained cages ofskin and need

as we launch ourselvesinto the tide,
creatures crafted fromcloud and night

given safe passage andbrief voice
by the caprice of thisshifting pearl-grey light.

Bombay-basedpoet, cultural theorist and curator Ranjit Hoskote’s eighth poetry collectionis Icelight (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023). The firstof his collections to be published in the United States, I’m intrigued at thesubtleties of the lyric dialogues and thesis contained within this particularcollection, my introduction to both him and his work. “The rain never lies.” hewrites, to open the poem “RUNNER,” “It just shifts / the names of our seasons.”His poems offer meditations on attention, beauty and memory; on seeking andbeing lost, almost to the point of allowing for the space to become lost, sothat one might allow for renewed discovery. “What if I had / no skin / Of what/ am I the barometer?” he writes, to close the opening poem, “TACET.”There is a way his poems attend to the simple beauty of the everyday, and afresh perspective on the simplest of known knowns and known unknowns. “Am I theboy / who climbed this spur / and laid claim / to the scrubland swearing / inits shade?” his narrator asks, to open the poem “SPUR.” His poems offer anelement of calm and clarity across poems fully aware of their mortality. Set insix clusters of lyric narratives, these are poems run through a foundation oflonging, and how words are formed, offering both as a lineage of lyric discovery:he is learning what the words are saying at the same moment you are. “I’vefound the seed bed, Earth,” he writes, to close the poem “WITNESS,” “I wait foryou // to say: It’s time. Let me tell you / why you’re here.”