For poet Vikram Seth, "bright
darkness" offers comfort and "dark daylight" is a friend. In "Summer Requiem", his latest published book Seth's eloquence meanders across time, seasons and countries to present observations of a world that both "gifts and harms."
Written over a period of two decades, the slender book of poems comes after a gap of 25 years after his stand-alone poetry collection "All Who You Sleep Tonight" (1990).
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"Let's say I frequently write but publish infrequently. This book is from a large collection of individual poems accumulated over a period. I was bullied into doing it because some of my friends wanted to read what I had written and asked why I was hoarding the poems," Seth says.
The celebrated poet said he was glad to bring out the book now because, "Sometimes I read some of the poems that I had written and discovered I was quite surprised, I could tell you that it was my style but I did not remember having written it."
The six page lead poem, "Summer Requiem" after which Seth's book takes its name, had been written over 20 years ago and was not included in his last book because he was "not sure about what it meant."
"That poem is the earliest poem ... I tinkered with it and massaged it for many years, in a kind of trance almost because what that poem means your guess is as good as mine," says Seth who decided to finally publish it after realising that the more he worked on the poem the more it would be "weakened".
The 63-year-old writer who has studied and lived in England and the US and also travelled extensively to China, manages to bring in insert references to music and art into his literary works.
The concluding part of "Summer Requiem" contains the Minterne: Four Poems that Seth was commissioned to write and set to music as part of celebrations for the 45th anniversary of the Summer Music Society of Dorset, in England.
"Minterne is the name of a grand house in England. A lady there 50 years ago decided that she would have a music festival and just as ancestors of the house had filled the valley with trees she filled it with music," Seth says.
Among the poems he wrote is one about a handkerchief tree titled "Tree of Many Names."
"It is about a very strange and mysterious tree, which is called a dove tree or a ghost tree because there are large white almost square bracts which in a certain season cover the entire tree so that it looks like a tree made entirely of handkerchiefs.
"...It was discovered in China and was very difficult to recreate and cultivate but they managed to cultivate it," Seth says.
