“I’ll Have It Here: Poems” by Jeet Thayil

Jeet Thayil

As an award-winning novelist, Jeet Thayil may need little introduction, but given that I’ll Have It Here is his first collection in a decade and a half, some readers may need some reminding that he is also an accomplished poet.

The poems in this new collection sit, sometimes comfortably, sometimes precariously, between tradition and modernity, alternately looking forward and backwards, or inwards and outwards, sometimes at the same time. It probably comes as no surprise that a good number of poems deal with issues of the day; poets are often activists of one kind or another, and Thayil’s poetry deals with everything from politics to personal loss.

 

I’ll Have It Here: Poems, Jeet Thayil (Fourth Estate India, November 2024)
I’ll Have It Here: Poems, Jeet Thayil (Fourth Estate India, November 2024)

But if poetry is to be the vehicle for the message, one can’t let the message supersede the technique. For those who like their poetry to scan and rhyme, Thayil may prove bracing, with unusual rhymes schemes—multiple repetitive rhymes and rhymes in the middle of lines:

 

‘Why do we live here?’
said the kid to a sky that rained fire.
‘To ride the river, to know desire
and live in the shiver,’
he said, moving higher.

 

The rhyme scheme is also sometimes deployed to create a rhythm that almost pulses.

 

The climate’s in crisis, to breathe is to ache in India.
Too cold or too hot, we freeze and bake in India.

 

They police our thoughts, our posts, our clothes, our food.
The news, and the government, is fake in India.

 

Beat the students bloody, then file a case against them.
Criminals in power know the laws to break in India.

 

Sometimes the form is explicit as in “Stress-Test Ghazal”.

 

Where are you tonight, spilling your thousand tears?
Here, where you are not, each night’s a thousand years.

 

But Thayil can use form for purpose. In “X-Ray Spec”, Thayil treats the topic of ethnic identity with some irony, saving it from being ponderous, in blank verse that flows from word to word.

 

In England, sorry, Britain, we’re all Asian,
which is really okay if you ask me, but probably
only if you ask me. In the American demarcation
we’re South Asian, specifically and affably
monochrome, or sometimes we’re Indian-American
(not American-Indian because that’s a whole
other brethren) or Pakistani-American
or Kashmiri-American …

 

The collection is full of literary, cultural and historical references, as diverse as Baudelaire and Ghandi to the Beach Boys:

 

Pet Sounds is a reminder of a gone time,
when Black or Brown or Jewish people
weren’t seen. You saw us only when you drove,
windows up, through certain neighbourhoods.
You love Pet Sounds because this is music
before blackness entered the world.

 

and Ibn Battuta (in a poem called “1325”):

 

Shams al-Din the Tangerine is twenty-one
when he sets off on pilgrimage.
A year or two, he imagines, then back home
to practise law like his father and his father’s father.
Introducing himself as Ibn Battuta, he visits
two hundred and eleven towns and cities
in forty countries across three continents.

 

Thayil doesn’t avoid the personal—“Mind if I Smoke?” is a reference to tragedy—as does, one supposes the deceptively simple lines of “Twenty-Four”:

 

I loved someone
And didn’t say.
Love grew wings
And flew away.

 

Poetry can be an acquired taste, and not all of these will appeal to everyone. But Thayil’s poems are, individually and as a collection both familiar and accessible as well as challenging and thought-provoking enough to be a way to acquire it if one hasn’t already.


Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.