April 22, 2006

Gautam Verma, In Ladakh (Shearsman Books, 2005). 18 pages. Free.

There are many outside factors (religious, geographic, political, economic...) that make Ladakh heavy with meaning in and of itself. But Verma's poem can be read as a pilgrimage narrative in which the pilgrim takes in and processes every aspect of the journey, finding no detail unimportant or unworthy of recollection. Everything from traffic, the perilous road conditions and the signs that warn drivers, to the striation of rocks... nothing escapes the pilgrim's attention:

a convoy of trucks
a truck at a time

on roads as these

occasionally
a river crossing
where the mountain stream has breached its channel (8).

In places Verma inbeds a subtle anti-colonialism into the text:

at Baralacha we are equal in height
to the highest peak in Europe (8)

The pilgrim acheives his goal at the temple:

the great drum roll (vibration
that's right through you)

like no music & no noise
either

some other listening
than the ear's (14)

The attention to natural phenomena depicts as beautiful a landscape as I can remember in my recent readings. The Tibetan Buddhism that is central to the text gives it a concreteness that can be understood and appreciated by anyone. In fact the writing is so sensory, it verges on overload. A beautiful read for a Saturday morning.