Salman Tarik Kureshi
Author
Coming of Age
Poems
The ninety poems chosen for this volume include a few from the early part of my writing life, most from my years of maturity, and a number from my days of deepening senescence. I have lived for what most would consider a longish time. In fact, according to the Bureau of Statistics, less than half a percent of the people in this country have lived for as long as I have. I have been writing poetry, or attempting to write it, for most of those years.
The first poem here, Hummingbird, was my first serious attempt at writing verse. I was not yet sixteen when I wrote it. Prior to this, there had been a whole lot of faux Augustan exercises in metrical versification, or twilight-lit, vaguely fin du siècle, romantic exertions. There were also a few embarrassing attempts at imitating poets as far apart as John Dryden and T.S. Eliot. Hummingbird was to be my first ‘proper’ poem.
I was immensely excited by what I had recently read in Ezra Pound’s Imagist Manifesto, which emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision through the use of exacting visual images and of writing in musical, rather than formally metrical, rhythms and structures. This, my teenage self had felt, was the way to go to work. The result was Hummingbird.
I had recently started college and I submitted the poem to The Ravi, the legendary magazine of my college, which had known such famous editors as Allama Iqbal, Patras Bokhari, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The editor of my day, to which my poem was submitted, rejected it…I will not say if this reflects on his editorial judgement or on my poem. (It’s entirely another matter that this same editor and I were to become close friends in later life, enjoying many evenings of convivial liquids and stimulating conversation.)
While I could never again capture the lightness and lyric quality of Hummingbird, its adherence to Imagist principles has guided almost all my poetic work since, even as I would later add Symbols and even visualised Abstractions to Images as the bedrock of my verse.
The last poem in the book is Nightsong. It was written just this last summer. Thus, my poetic career spans an expanse thus far of sixty-six years. I had thought of calling this poem Nocturne, but did not feel this would be an appropriate title for a work of such an unrelievedly grim quality. It seems that, from skimming the skies and flowers of Hummingbird, I have traversed a varied poetic landscape, only to find myself plodding over broken pavements in the darkness and filth of this Nightsong. Is it the grimness and confusion of these times that brings me to this state of mind? Or just the starless, gathering night of the aging process? That is not for me to say.
(From the Preface by Salman Tarik Kureshi)
Bibliography
Publisher : Alhamra Publishing
Published : February 1, 2025
Language : English
ISBN : 978-94-645-9333-4
Format : Paperback
Pages : 204
Dimensions : 140 x 215 mm
