Going beyond pretty rhymes
Where Parallel Lines Meet draws attention to the rising star of a poet whose talent goes beyond pretty lyricism. Khair is a fine versifier and a provocative thinker whose ruminations on his roots in India and a present in Copenhagen take traditional musings on history and diaspora a step further.
This is an ambitious collection. Khair tackles the necessity of nostalgia, the unhealed wounds of history, the weight of languages, the blinkered vision of Naipaul and his critics. Occasionally, the poetry falters under the burden of its ambition-a few degenerate into maudlin nostalgia, while some waver from early promise into banality.
These are minor stutters in an otherwise fluent collection. Few poems have used sound quite as effectively as Poems from Outside a Muharram Procession: "The clash of arms, the clasp of armour/ (Ya Hassan, Ya Hussain)." Khair also understands how to blend personal and political. In Shobraat, he mourns the cultural amnesia that has made it a "Festival of rolls I cannot read, names forgotten." Restrained irony marks The Vanished Dravidians, where the narrator hopes that the Dravidians left of their own accord: "It makes such a difference/ Whether their end was here or somewhere else."
In one of the shortest poems in the book, Khair muses on the value that stories hold-for exiles, for those striving to understand history, for those grappling with languages their own and not their own. "Some stories I'll salt," he writes, and following in his wake, there are many poems here that readers would salt too, and stash away for future winters barren of poems or poets.