Anu Lakhan's latest book – On the edge of perfection

A LEAF can be as sharp as a blade. Paper can cut. Some fruits slice the tongue. Similarly, poems can be daggers. In Anu Lakhan’s The Proper Care of Knives, we are reminded how.

This is an artfully produced limited edition – the initial run will be 200 copies – published by the local Argotiers Press. The design, by Ananda Poon, reminds you of those beautiful, old-school poetry anthologies you find in bookstores. Except, instead of the quaint typeset fleurons you might see in such books, each poem’s title starts with a little knife ornament, a kind of cross laid on its side. There is danger. And much like Lakhan’s previous work, 2018’s Letters to K, also published by Argotiers Press and another small native outlet, Toof Press, there is a strong, consistent tone.

The opening piece, How to Say This, – among the earliest written by the poet here – provides a blueprint, an Ars poetica if you will, for the collection, declaring “I am accidentally fatal” and “I am lightning glass and fragile” and “I am silk spoken and softening” and “I am undreamed of hoping / I am witness for the defence.” This cascading litany rushes at us with the intensity of a waterfall. It invites us to view the rest of the collection through the crystalline prism of its embedded contradictions.

In almost all the poems that follow, the syntax is poised between the equative and the imperative; between a statement of things as they are and a call to action.

The best example is Whale 1, a poem which consists entirely of, first, a declaration that “the dream of whales / is always followed by / dizziness” and subsequent commands: “take this, it will help”; “take it anyway.” It is as if the narrative voice seeks to create worlds through declarative and incantatory modes. I find something powerfully symbolic in this aspect of Lakhan’s style. At a time of destructive undoing, these poems are, even when they unfasten themselves, about making.

The knife is one of literature’s most enduring symbols. It can be a weapon, or a thing used to peel oranges; a protective talisman, or a letter opener; a multi-purpose tool, or a means of spreading butter; a phallic symbol, or a solid paperweight. Not all poems here are concerned with this object. I am not even sure the knives that do feature are meant to carry a specific meaning. But it is worth holding close to the constellation of possibilities.

For, in these poems, “our words are corners we turn.” Posed in each are, exhilaratingly, questions that seem like answers. Or answers that seem like questions.

If It Starts With Yes begins: “I think, if it starts with yes / there has been a misunderstanding.” (The very title of the poem, with its conditional if, undermines certainty.) In Vow, we end up “fluttering in between always / and never.” The sequence Forgetting: in 3 Acts starts “He thinks of her” but then, in the next line, continues: “she thinks, / or hopes, but not even that.” This wilful instability of sense finds memorable expression in If Suddenly, (yet again, if destabilises) through which a “nervous rider” on a horse is urged: “beware.” The conditional is closed by an imperative utterance; through roving something still emerges. The poem may as well be about the impulse to create.

We come, some of us, to art for such mysteries, and in this book, we yield to pages filled with “more spaces than words.” The poems are short – some just one, two or three lines – yet feel expansive.

In Day, the burden of waiting is dramatised by a statement that suddenly bolts across: “The elastic hours stretch the sky (to white, perhaps, or silver).” The use of bracketed lines (and even bracketed titles) creates space within space – further troubling dimension. Within ‘Ever,’ we find “prehistoric stones” that are “unwriting the times of countries.” Marsh consists of just fifteen words over eight lines, but it might as well be an epic; Mammoth, too, is startling in how far back it makes us, with concentration, think. The untitled poem on page 90 is just the following two lines: “I am the cold ocean / hurricanes dread.” The scale here is tremendous and inversely related to the length of the poem. Even the poem’s lack of title underlines, paradoxically, its chilling gravitas.

Yet, while many of the pieces do not bear titles, of those that did, I felt two were somewhat problematic in their loose reference to certain tropes. But they might be explained by a project outwardly approximating an earlier time when a revision of the terms used to identify certain groups today had yet to find prominence; to that period from which the old book of yore seems to have teleported. More pleasing as a form of time travel is the poem Dear K, which harks to the poet’s 2018 chapbook, though in a dramatically inverse relationship given the careful whimsy of the previous publication.

The Proper Care of Knives starts with a question. Through its pairing of things that simply are with calls to action, it builds into something incandescent. At a time of so much stolid rigidity, it provides liberation. Lakhan is a poet living in the Caribbean and the project here cannot be divorced from the politics of being a writer in this space. If these poems cast a spell, if they invite us to imagine, wonder and create, to place ink stains on our fingers, it is because they know we have the capacity “to fill the endlessness.” They say, “bring light, bring bright / bring love.” They reject the authoritarianism that would disappear mothers. And they promise that these words of Lakhan’s are just a start. This luminous and moving book starts with a question of how to begin writing poems yet ends with the beautiful promise: “i have more.”

Anu Lakhan is a mental health advocate who writes a weekly column in the Sunday Newsday.