A LEAF can be as sharp as a blade. Paper can cut. Some fruits slice the tongue. Similarly, poems can be daggers. In Anu Lakhan’s The Proper Care of Knives, we are reminded how.
This is an artfully produced limited edition – the initial run will be 200 copies – published by the local Argotiers Press. The design, by Ananda Poon, reminds you of those beautiful, old-school poetry anthologies you find in bookstores. Except, instead of the quaint typeset fleurons you might see in such books, each poem’s title starts with a little knife ornament, a kind of cross laid on its side. There is danger. And much like Lakhan’s previous work, 2018’s Letters to K, also published by Argotiers Press and another small native outlet, Toof Press, there is a strong, consistent tone.
The opening piece, How to Say This, – among the earliest written by the poet here – provides a blueprint, an Ars poetica if you will, for the collection, declaring “I am accidentally fatal” and “I am lightning glass and fragile” and “I am silk spoken and softening” and “I am undreamed of hoping / I am witness for the defence.” This cascading litany rushes at us with the intensity of a waterfall. It invites us to view the rest of the collection through the crystalline prism of its embedded contradictions.
In almost all the poems that follow, the syntax is poised between the equative and the imperative; between a statement of things as they are and a call to action.
The best example is Whale 1, a poem which consists entirely of, first, a declaration that “the dream of whales / is always followed by / dizziness” and subsequent commands: “take this, it will help”; “take it anyway.” It is as if the narrative voice seeks to create worlds through declarative and incantatory modes. I find something powerfully symbolic in this aspect of Lakhan’s style. At a time of destructive undoing, these poems are, even when they unfasten themselves, about making.
The knife is one of literature’s most enduring symbols. It can be a weapon, or a thing used to peel oranges; a protective talisman, or a letter opener; a multi-purpose tool, or a means of spreading butter; a phallic symbol, or a solid paperweight. Not all poems here are concerned with this object. I am not even sure the knives that do feature are meant to carry a specific meaning. But it is worth holding close to the constellation of possibilities.
For, in these poems, “our words are corners we turn.” Posed in each are, exhilaratingly, questions that seem like answers. Or answers that seem like questions.
If It Starts With Yes begins: “I think, if it starts with yes / there has been a misunderstanding.” (The very title of the poem, with its conditional if, undermines certainty.) In Vow, we end up “fluttering in between always / and never.” The sequence Forgetting: in 3 Acts starts “He thinks of her” but then, in the next line, continues: “she thinks, / or hopes, but not even that.” This wilful instability of sense finds memorable expression in If Suddenly, (yet again, if destabilises) through which a “ner
