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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" published in the year 1990.
"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, "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," said Seth. He 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 U.S 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 said.
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.
"A Prayer For My Novel" is perhaps Seth's reference to his upcoming fiction "A Suitable Girl", which is a much awaited and long delayed sequel to magnum opus "The Suitable Boy."
"I am still expecting it," Seth said about the publication of the fiction.
His book has one poem he has titled "Haiku." The haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry of 3 lines that rarely rhyme.
"No Further War" Seth says is a compression of a poem that he wrote in his first poetry collection, "Mappings" and is his fear for the earth today.
"We are the last generations; Surdas, Bach/ Rembrandt, Du Fu, all life, love, work and worth/ Will end in the particular rain," writes Seth.
"Every century produces a few good leaders, its bad leaders and the total lunatics. Through the advance of technology and weaponry this century will actually have a way to destroy ourselves," Seth said
While Seth can be bullied into getting his poems published he is much more protective of his art works- paintings and calligraphy.
"I have done painting and calligraphy for many years and actually spent more time doing them than writing. I actually am much more careful with my paintings. I haven't shown my paintings and I don't want to show until I feel they are good enough," said the poet.
Chinese and Arabic calligraphy holds the interest of the author who says, "Portraits and also landscapes and nature appeals to me a lot. Even when I am painting a room ...I treat it almost like a landscape, it is a roomscape." The same can be said of music for the author whose first novel "Golden Gate" set in San Francisco was entirely in verse and in the next fiction "An Equal Music" set in England deals with the troubled love life of a violinist.
"People who lose themselves in music are so lucky there is a whole world there," said the novelist.
(With agency inputs)
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