A Crossroad where Transience Meets Perpetuity

A Review of Ranjit Hoskote’s Icelight by Tamoghna Mukherjee

In an interview with Sumeet Keswani, Ranjit Hoskote once said, “I think what all the arts do is that they sensitise you to that moment when there’s a leap into unpredictability and [you] come upon something that is a mystery.” Keeping these words in mind, it won’t be preposterous to infer that immersing oneself in the depth of poetry has always been one of the profoundest experiences human beings have ever attained. The sensitisation of mind that appears as a corollary to the process of delving into the realm of poetry is not only transcendental but also panacean in its multifaceted sense. Reading Hoskote’s new collection Icelight (2023) can help one imbibe the spell of unpredictability and traverse through the intricacies of reality as well. A book, that has its bone made of irredeemable melancholia and flesh concocted with contemplation, dilemma, premonition, memory, and belief, Icelight has its root deeply embedded in the ethical inquiry of a poet who situates himself at the confluence of inward vision and disintegrating outwardness.

The title itself offers an oxymoronic image— “ice” being a metaphor for a chilling reality that is stagnant to its core, a symbol of stasis and silence, whereas “light” evokes motion, revelation, and epiphany. As Tishani Doshi remarks, Icelight works “like lyric spell—forged from flint and amber, excavated along trade routes and fissures of language.” The juxtaposition of ice and light becomes an oblique hint towards a reality where transparency does not suffice to the process of achieving transparency, but a new possibility which craves for nuanced approaches towards unsettling memories and a precarious future.

The collection begins with a poem called ‘Tacet,’ in which silence appears like a musical imperative, and yet constructs a scene that possesses sonical profundity: “She stood under a drizzle of copper leaves/ mouth opened in a hymn of praise/ Voice tacet/ Only the chirping of sparrows/ heard on the terrace/ above sleeping town.” This certain paradox—praise devoid of sound, voice pulsating with silence—is prominent throughout the collection. The protagonist of this poem emblematically represents a voice yet to be heard, and is situated against the backdrop of a location yet to be awake. One should notice that the silence here is not emptiness but a modality of presence. As the poem comes to an end, we come across some cryptic enquiries : “What if there was no border/ between flesh and light/ What if I had/ no skin/ Of what/ am I the barometer?” The deepest desire of getting free from the bodily boundary appears to be a longing for a state of permeability—a collapse of the material and the ethereal. The questions become suggestive of both empathetic sympathy and existential bewilderment.

What becomes pivotal in this collection is Hoskote’s negotiation with grief. It is essential to note that the poems do not confine themselves in the known, often clichéd, boundary of personal grief, but uphold historical and planetary loss. In ‘Clock,’ dedicated to Hoskote’s father Raghubir Narayan Hoskote (1926-2021), whom Hoskote fondly remembers as “my first guide into the labyrinth,” the clock appears as a medium that can transport one’s mind to the realm of reminiscence. In that realm, memories are released like a flock: “When I open the door/ to wind the clock/ nine decades of starlings/ fly out.” The impact of his father on his life becomes prominent in the concluding lines of this poem: “and the face reflected/ in the pendulum/ as I steady and swing it/ is my father’s.” The poem “Bookmark,” dedicated to his Amma, deals with extremely personal aspects of life where the intermingling of corporeality (such as bodily decay: “You took/ the sun with you, left behind just a dull shade/ of bright, a trail of sloughed skin, a casing.”) and memory happens seamlessly: “The last thing you asked me:/ Do the parrots still nest/ in the tree outside your window?/ A question I’ll never heard again.” The shift from philosophical certainty to personal ache is both tender and destabilising. The mother’s death is not elegised through catharsis but through a diminution of light, a sapping of warmth. Moreover, the poem draws upon a Wittgensteinian proposition as prescribed in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) (“The world is everything that is the case”) and skillfully undercuts this proposition with subtle remarks like “Let no one think the world is everything that is the case.”

This poetic endeavour has its roots embedded in the politics of language. Language in Icelight does not operate as a mere means of expression, rather becomes an entity making its presence noticably conspicuous with its absence, erasures and hauntings. This is explicitly presented in poems like ‘Paisachi,’ in which the speaker invokes a now-extinct “nineteenth-century linguistic chimera that funds a tragic metaphorical resonance today.” Here, language operates beyond its primary role of representation; it emerges as a metaphor for cultural repression. This poem is a homage to the playwright, director and actor Mohammad Subhan Bhagat (1927-1993) who played a significant role in reviving Bhand Pather, a particular form of folk theatre that originally belongs to the Valley of Kashmir. Bhagat became a victim of rising violence and extremism, and as Hoskote himself writes in the notes section, “Silenced by forces inimical to the free, irreverent expression of ideas and opinions, Bhagat’s voice became the voice of a ghost, of a society reduced to spectral cries and whispers.”

Furthermore, Icelight can be read as a record of environmental degradation. Hoskote’s commitment to the Japanese mono-no-aware aesthetics which fundamentally presents human emotions, especially sorrow, evoked by the awareness of the transient nature of things and their eventual passing, gets expression in the poetic treatment of environmental crises. For example, in the poem ‘Dust,’ the images evoke a sense of ecological deterioration: “Our trees grew sour and blanched as their mistimed fruit./ The sun’s slightest breath would melt the ice/ in our glasses.” The poem ends with a pessimistic yet philosophical tone: “That apex and base are just the same/ and every predator ends as game.// The golden light that’s left is all dust.” The ephemeral nature of worldly entities as depicted in this poem is what suggests how mortality, aesthetics, and life itself collapse in due course.

However, the indirect, subtle, often esoteric approach of Hoskote can raise a serious question. Does such poetic approach lessen the severity of the crises he tries to bring to the fore by prioritising implication over illusion? Does metaphor fulfill the necessity of addressing certain crises in a comprehensive way? This is not meant to support didacticism, but to draw attention to the possibility that poetry could become complicit in the aestheticization of disaster if it becomes overly fixated on its own beauty. Nevertheless, it cannot be discarded that despite this aesthetic stance, Hoskote’s ecological vision does not fail to uphold important posthuman aspects like the entanglement with nonhuman time, the dissolution of human centrality, and the emphasis on material decay. An engaging perusal of his works can vouch for the fact that his poetics of ruin is attentive rather than sentimental. What is more important is the fact the ruins in Icelight do not delimit the scope of regeneration, rather become the places where new listening starts, new hopes emerge.

In conclusion, it can be said that Hoskote’s Icelight is a commendable outcome of a poetic engagement. As a collection of formal elegance and intellectual rigour, Icelight possesses the ability to engage its reader with language, silence, and history in both pragmatic and empathetic ways.  And, as Shabnam Mirchandani in her review of this very collection correctly asserts, “The voice that permeates these pages is at once an anthropomorphic presence, a keenly felt absence, a shadowy spectre, an elemental vibration, and a crumpled whisper. It suggests a plurality of consciousnesses within the field of subjectivity, fitting in a book of poems in which a sense of a singular self is radically contested” (published in The Bangalore Review, May 2023). Ultimately, Icelight asks its readers to accept certain challenges—to pay steadfast attention to silence, to imbibe the enigma of forgotten speech, to imagine and, therefore, celebrate the presence light as it refracts through ice.