The Last Tea by Athar Tahir — Book Review

The most self effacing and subjective of his works

The Last Tea, Athar Tahir’s fresh poetry collection finally arrives bearing gifts from Japan. The cover and a large part of the book’s content are inspired by a Japanese aesthetic in both form and content. To look at, the jacket is a delicious tomato red with a panel of a choice tea-serving 18^th century painting, “Tea Ceremony” by Isoda Koryūsai topped by the collection title and the poet’s name and side flanked by the title in Japanese calligraphy. If you are a reader that likes to preserve the jacket your delights will not be ruined by its temporary removal for sure enough the hard binding itself is an image of the jacket and the book is lined on the inside with a refreshing orange and has indeed its very own yellow ribbon to bring you back from where you left off reading.

The Last Tea is Tahir’s sixth poetry collection, the others being The Gift of Possession (2012), Body Loom (2006), Yielding Years (2001), A Certain Season (2000) and Just Beyond the Physical (1991). Two of these won Pakistan’s highest prize for Literature in English, The Patras Bokhari Award. These reflect Tahir’s long relationship with the exercise of poetry and an increasing preoccupation with the discipline of the poetic form. Beneath all, there is a sustained romance with the visual and experiential reality being cast into language.

The Last Tea is paradoxically the most self effacing and subjective of his works. The haiku necessitates such rendering in the fixity of its present day three liner form: five, seven and five syllables respectively. There are clear leanings towards haiku formations in his previous collection The Gift of Possession. The Last Tea was well under way when the previous collection was published and its small wonder then that shades of the fresh collection were on its revising. The image was already acquiring succinctness there and little haikus seemed embedded in the collection’s fabric. I will return to the form in detail later.

The Last Tea, though its claims are largely Japanese in the title and jacket, is divided into three sections. The first section carries over poems on familial themes from The Gift of Possession and inherits from Tahir’s earlier poems on nature. The second section, Haiku Aviary, is devoted to discrete images of birds. The third and the final section, Japan Journal collects experiential reality from Japan, a place much admired by Tahir for its cleanliness and the aesthetic of simplicity and choreographed beauty.

In this collection of Tahir’s, the mystical undercurrents are the strongest so far. It inaugurates with “Response to Rumi” claiming space in the inherited tradition of oriental mystical poetry. Tahir charts an independent route of pen-sung atonement for man’s first separation and his “one eternal need” (41).The poem thus promises that the collection will offer forms shaping this longing for the source. He looks for time-old inscription in the stone tabloid of river-rounded pebbles in “Stone Letter”, wondering if the stone’s structure reads a life “waiting/ To break the shell?” (44). The goatherd looks for the missing goat and “Night Fog” creates illusions of “caves and tunnels” offering a rendition of fog very different from what the earlier collection presents.

There is a sequence of nature poems punctuated by familial ones, largely valedictory, recording partings underscored by acceptance. The farewell to the son is superimposed by similar earlier farewells bid to the speaker in the poem. The familial poems however are not the highlight of the collection and would have found a better fit in The Gift of Possession that is imbued with thoughts and scenes of home and family.

The Last Tea, though its claims are largely Japanese in the title and jacket, is divided into three sections. The first section carries over poems on familial themes from The Gift of Possession and inherits from Tahir’s earlier poems on nature. The second section, Haiku Aviary, is devoted to discrete images of birds

The states-of-being poems: “Love”, “Happiness”, “Loss”, “Grief” and “Death” ring aphoristic. They are low in image and high in understated emotion, offering a tone preparatory of the haiku simplicity of a more poetic nature.

The celebratory monsoon poem ”Seventeen Ways of Looking at the Monsoon” redolent with local songs of barsaat crowns the first section. This is probably the section that Dr Wasim Anwar, in his introduction to the book, finds has a kinship with the mahya.

A crow caws

On the verandah wall –

“My love will come this dark monsoon.” (51)

The indigenous image is elsewhere checkmated with a distanced eye:

Naked children splash water –

Adam’s first offsprings

In the first rain. (52)

By the seventeenth way of looking at the Monsoon, the rain and river define the landscape in “water”, levelling land and sky to its single element completing the water spell of what is for us a recognisable feature of barsaat.

Those who have been following Tahir’s career as a poet will be interested to note the revisions he has introduced in “A Certain Season” (64) which first appeared in his 2000 collection by the same name. These delights I shall leave to the reader to discover and move on to “Twenty-one Ways of Looking at Silence” (78). This poem which Dr Anwar perhaps has in mind when he talks of the dhora in the “Introduction” finds image equivalents for the indescribable experience of silence:

The full moon

On a marble cenotaph. (80)

The pared down image places the reader at an intelligent distance from the visual image taking away the possibility of auditory perception or the need thereof:

In a hole in a hill

A meditating monk. (79)

The assorted poems of the first section lead to the heart of the collection with Haiku Aviary, a delightful presence of familiar birds among which ensconced we find Farid ud-Din Attar’s Hoopoe from The Conference of the Birds. The subtle presence suddenly adds to the section the dimension of personal journey, self-reflection and the poetic possibility of self discovery in an aviary where there is three-fourth of a page free-space for each bird to be. Each haiku resides on the top rung of the plain yellow page washed with nothing else but the mind-space congestion-free for “old wisdom” (91) to learn humility from the haiku whose power lies in discipline and self-restraint. It pays homage, as does the Japanese culture, to free space for the eternal soul to happen:

High in the pipal

Longer than its feathered form

The black koel’s coo. (95)

The third section, Japan Journal is the reverberating soul of the book, the aesthetic that the rest is a preparation for. Here Tahir finds himself:

The land’s long arm holds

The gentle thrust of the sea

As I old ardour. (107)

The third section is the land in whose “Native courtesy” (107) images are blent into forms of gratitude and wisdom:

Grass stretch, sky, blossoms.

No figure disturbs the land.

The present, timeless. (109)

The haiku moment of quiet intensity is suited to the unsayable mystical experience that seeks image equivalents to render itself into language. The near epiphanic awakening of the moment and its quiet acceptance is accommodated in the succinct form.

Sucked surge from the rot

Shivers along the branches

In healing blossoms. (115)

In Japanese the haiku is rendered vertically on the page. Its three liner equivalent in English parallels its three phases in the Japanese original. Tahir fuses the two layouts in “Osaka1” and 2 (122,123). Here the alphabets are dropped down the page to form words. The poem then appears as three vertical lines of alphabets, each letter uncrowded on either side. The page presents a disciplined visual tribute to the Japanese haiku.

“Fuji” (160) outlines the form of the mountain known to the world in its postcard image. The first line of the poem carves the form of Mount Fuji: ascending, plateau, descending. Thus the three words,” Around Fuji, Hills” sit mountain shaped on the base of the remaining two lines of the haiku. The negative space included beneath this mountain becomes nature’s depth and the mind’s as it explores the aspects of Fuji. There are other visual treats for the tempted as the layout of “Tokyo Sakura 1” (148) that visually imitates a scattering, dislodging, drunkenness.

The states-of-being poems: “Love”, “Happiness”, “Loss”, “Grief” and “Death” ring aphoristic. They are low in image and high in understated emotion, offering a tone preparatory of the haiku simplicity of a more poetic nature

The concept of negative space is significant in art at large that spares much of the canvas as it forms itself. In the literary arts poetry is the most respectful of the page that houses it. In Tahir’s collection the outlined negative spaces as well as the page spared by words is a conscious tribute to the silence that makes language meaningful and elusive. The discrete activity and wisdom of the collection’s yellow paper speaks of time past. It open mindedly contextualises experience handed over as undisturbed image. It is this restraint and respect for space and economy of language that makes this collection a welcome addition to the world of poetry:

From a language

Where letters shorten for words

To yours where sounds seek

Approximate images

We overlapped, just.

“Parting Tanka” (167)

“The Last Tea” is the farewell token of the collection: a souvenir of “The Last Supper”, the legacy of the samurai, the perfection of the Japanese tea ceremony and the art of dignified departure. Tempted as I am to share the details of its deep and quiet composition, I will leave you to sip its three liners un-noised by my pleasure. Suffice it to say it is already translated in Urdu by Ms Fehmida Riaz — for those who care to court Japanese ritual in a South Asian language – and in Italian.

The Last Tea is so far the most quiet poetic collection by Tahir. Its crisp handling of images eschews excess and expresses a defined inclination towards what Hemingway calls: the purity of line. The integrity it accords to the object of observation, be it tree, bird or tea ceremony, is the index of clear-eyed experience and a career long practice in disciplined poetic form. The collection in the English language offering indigenous trees, birds, family concerns and Japanese art, discipline and location is a rich cultural experience.

The Last Tea

Written by: M Athar Tahir

Published by: Tana Bana Publishers & International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English, Kinnaird College, Lahore