As I sit down to write about Akhil Katyal’s latest collection of poems, “The Last Time I Saw You”, the words of David Foster Wallace come to mind: “Every love story is a ghost story.” Like Wallace, Katyal’s poems too often navigate the complexities of love, longing, and loss, but with a unique voice that defies straightforward categorization. His fourth collection, published when he’s 39, is a testament to his growth as a poet and as a person.
Katyal’s poetry is not just about the “tuff”-honed, raw emotions of love, but also about the nostalgia that creeps in, the sense of loss, and the longing that permeates our daily lives. His poems often employ the familiar devices of love poetry, but they also frequent historical archives, literature, and even social causes. The result is a sense of fluidity that mirrors the artist’s own multidisciplinary journey, which has seen him venture into translation, literary analysis, and social activism.
In “God Hasn’t Abandoned You”, Katyal writes, “trust is hung on walls/like old calendars”, echoing the wry observations of Erich Fried, another poet who saw the love poem as a vessel to explore the world. Katyal’s own poetry travels through the 39-year-old’s eyes, often tiptoeing the borders of straightforward love, exploring the victualler’s practiced flattery, or the disdain of imitation. Poems like “Day Eleven of Learning Italian” and “Reading Rilke’s ‘Love Song’ in German” draw on his work as a translator, as do the titular verse, which is as good as any to be widely anthologized.
One of my favorite poems in this collection is “Darwin”, which recounts the scientist’s experiment where he instructed his children to stare at the sun to study their faces. As a writer, I, too, have strived to explore ‘grief’ – a word that bridges the divide between loss and longing, reason and unreason. And indeed, the more I delved into the science of grief, the more I realized how closely it echoed my own attempts to make sense of the intricacies of love – an emotional topography that blazes the trail for reason, even as it constantly undermines it.
Born out of the realization that our myriad disciplines are but partial lenses through which to view the same multifaceted truth, Katyal’s work betrays a sense of largesse, a predisposition to veer away from self-indulgence towards a broader grasp of our experiences.
When I combine my roles as a translator and poet, I find that the slippage between languages becomes the very subject of poetry, a veritable playground for resonating with the meanings hidden within words – whether that’s through deciphering a Mir couplet, or learning a language while reveling in the prehistory of English, or simply watching TV shows to become more conversant in a particular language. It is precisely this realization that has grown increasingly important to me: that words are such robust storehouses of resonance, crying out to be unpacked.
Universal as his concerns may be, longing persists as a dominant force in many of his poems. And as I reflect on my own writing over the years, I note a gradual shift from precipitous longing to a more measured pace. There used to be a sense of urgency, whereas now there’s a desire to understand the world around me better. The words for the feeling do change, and so does the emotion itself. I long for love as much as for a world free from bigotry, whether it masquerades as religion, caste, race, or gender.
As I read “The Last Time I Saw You”, I’m struck by how Katyal transposes the Indian subcontinent’s tempestuous history onto a global canvas, weaving together India and Pakistan’s on-again, off-again dalliance. In doing so, he not only echoes, but also reaffirms, the dichotomy between belonging and longing, where the lines between love and animosity blur like an indistinct horizon.
Throughout our conversation, Katyal has spoken about the evolution of his craft, from his earliest days to the present. In those early days, there was a haste, a rush; over time, that pace has given way to a more measured approach. His responses are marked by increased sensitivity to the world around him, an attention to detail that belies an impatience gradually giving way to a quiet confidence. Like a masterful weaver, he blends disparate threads to create a rich tapestry that tenderly unravels the journeys of love, of longing, of loss – the basic human emotions that precipitate us into the complexities of our lives.