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The Desire of Roots
Third collection of poems by Robin S. Ngangom
- GenresPoetry
102 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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April 19, 2022
"Limbs turn into water
under the painted mediocrity
of the sky.
There sleeps within me
a desire not to meet anyone
in the long afternoons.
Lassitude settles,
on the bitch stretched on the roadside,
the folk singer plucking rain from blind strings,
the mind deadened by lust on a street
as sexless as a stockinged nun,
and summer passes again with the plums
and young women
sweet and bitter with juice.
Sometimes I'm certain
that I was nothing other than months
ripped from a former calendar."
// Summer
Robin Ngangom is a poet many of us would be familiar with already as he is included in school syllabi or in Indian Writing in English courses at the university level. I have been interested in his work for quite a while—although more so as an editor and translator than a poet—so had to get this when I saw it on the Red River catalog. He says, "Like the great poets / pardoned by time / I wanted to gather words / from arrows nocked in a turquoise sky." Soibam Haripriya reads him alongside Neruda—connecting the two across imagery, concerns, themes, and writing styles.
The comparison particularly comes into play in his writing of women which leaves me uneasy. Much like Neruda, they are sensuous objects of desire who, disembodied, briefly flit across the page without affirming themselves as subjects, held in a dispossessing gaze. Dispossession is of course a central theme of Ngangom's poetry. The blindly flailing roots, the poet in exile, and the home always out of his reach, a never to be realized elusive mirage, "a country where they took our past and returned as terrible dreams".
under the painted mediocrity
of the sky.
There sleeps within me
a desire not to meet anyone
in the long afternoons.
Lassitude settles,
on the bitch stretched on the roadside,
the folk singer plucking rain from blind strings,
the mind deadened by lust on a street
as sexless as a stockinged nun,
and summer passes again with the plums
and young women
sweet and bitter with juice.
Sometimes I'm certain
that I was nothing other than months
ripped from a former calendar."
// Summer
Robin Ngangom is a poet many of us would be familiar with already as he is included in school syllabi or in Indian Writing in English courses at the university level. I have been interested in his work for quite a while—although more so as an editor and translator than a poet—so had to get this when I saw it on the Red River catalog. He says, "Like the great poets / pardoned by time / I wanted to gather words / from arrows nocked in a turquoise sky." Soibam Haripriya reads him alongside Neruda—connecting the two across imagery, concerns, themes, and writing styles.
The comparison particularly comes into play in his writing of women which leaves me uneasy. Much like Neruda, they are sensuous objects of desire who, disembodied, briefly flit across the page without affirming themselves as subjects, held in a dispossessing gaze. Dispossession is of course a central theme of Ngangom's poetry. The blindly flailing roots, the poet in exile, and the home always out of his reach, a never to be realized elusive mirage, "a country where they took our past and returned as terrible dreams".
Displaying 1 of 1 review