Sharma is quieter, more reflective, and his poems are often like a brook running through snow or a mountain freshet. Not surprising, considering where he lives. In a haiku he writes, Sprouting shoots/snow’s grappling loose/under sunny marks.
In the poem, Vacations, he invites the reader to think and feel along with him, refraining from telling the reader anything, or singing to the reader, or lecturing. I am here, stirring around in/my papers,
shifting around,/while the visions, precise/and horrible, wrap themselves/around my throat as heart worm/grabs a dog’s heart. The lies are there.
Here we have a book that reminds us that our world, with all its horrific headlines and soundbites, is nonetheless a world in which poets are sending each other poems instantaneously, over borders, over
wars, over the heads of grasping politicians. This isn’t an accident.
And if it’s a paradox, surely it’s one that is somehow reshaping the world. Can a planet around which poems whoosh in the atmosphere moment after moment remain the same? If global warming is inexorably changing
us, then surely this incredible exchange of the best we can say will also change us.
The Banyan & The Alder, Martina Newberry and Bam Dev Sharma, Arabesques Editions, 2006, 85pp.
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