No Rhododendron

If poetry is, as has been defined, a species of magic, Samyak Shertok has conjured an elegant and sophisticated collection that is full of hybridity in form and subject. In the lines ‘What is it that they say about the tongue? / Something like a feathered blade that belongs / only to the dead,’ we are given a view into the conjuring—his view on how language expresses and depresses, how language as noise can mix into cacophony or clarify home. Homes. Diaspora. Conflict—as simple as war and as ambiguous. In all the hybridity, Shertok has stayed and strayed from forms as in his sonnet sequence. Most thrilling are Shertok’s hybrid inventions, where forms are mixed to great effect: the ghazabun is ghazal and haibun, and the ghazanellet is his ghazal, villanelle, and sonnet. And further, he offers forms of his own making that twine together words and sense. There are quotes from sutras, from Blake, from family. There is abiding grief and, in that, surviving to tell and retell stories. This debut collection is an absolute marvel.

No Rhododendron is a gorgeous, formally innovative collection that explores the loss of a father to cancer, the loss of a homeland to war and exile, and the anticipated loss of a mother whose identity contains the final memory of home. These poems do not merely praise or lament but consciously examine what it means to be unable to lament. They resist the elegy’s conventional gestures of closure and, at times, even the reader’s identification and empathy, as we see in the collection’s persona poems about the Maoist war in Nepal. As much as the reader is drawn in to witness grief, then, she is simultaneously reminded that the elegiac imagination can never fully reproduce or preserve the identities of the dead. A fantastic first collection.

In Samyak Shertok’s No Rhododendron, what we know of ourselves, our grief, our guilt, and our love for the vast and complicated ashes left behind by history realize themselves to the last syllable. Because history books never satisfy our thirst for a different kind of memory, we follow the poet into the textured noise—‘I'm speaking through a mouthful of bees’—of an epic tale torn into the tiny pieces of pronouncements, blessings, messages, complaints, news, prayers; into a cacophony of voices, familiar and strange, that belong to many participants of a tragedy seeking to be heard. Shertok’s uprooted, rain-beaten, jet-lagged language chants, crows, blooms, cries. His stark lines and poignant images slap us into awakening with the gentleness of a frightening, ancient-yet-still-unfolding fairy tale. Here’s a debut that rises out of ash and walks toward us like a ‘walking door of ash,’ shattered but gleaming.

No Rhododendron offers elegy and outrage, lyricism and edginess, poems in complex received and invented forms—including a moving sequence of sonnets whose lines must be read from bottom to top—and poems in prose. We have first-person accounts of Nepal’s brutal recent history (‘Beneath every threshold: bones of a nation / buried alive’) alongside magical tales and creatures and characters from Nepali folklore (‘In the morning, the junipers knew and the snow leopard cubs, the wind knew and the one-hundred-and-eight stars’). The real and the imaginary often work in tandem (‘The bees flew into her oiled black hair / and when she combed it, down / fell rhododendrons’). A remarkable debut by a remarkable poet.