Imtiaz Dharker’s disembodied voice floated into my consciousness  during a moment of insomnia  when I was listening to the World Service.  It kept me awake for an hour. Dharker is  a poet who recites her poetry from memory, like ordinary living speech and not in the dirge-like style of so many poets the moment they get near a public platform. Until then I had never heard of her but after only a few poems some of her qualities became plain: humour, compassion and a rich sense of the many faces of love.

So now I’m reading her latest collection Leaving Fingerprints (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) and find my late-night impressions were right. Her theme here  combines  impermanence and the preciousness of the moment with a strong sense of the presence in that moment of ancestral shadows. As a  restless wanderer through the external landscapes of town and country and the internal territories of the mind, body and emotions,  it’s a theme that appeals to me.

The room with two doors

Pass the wine, we’ll leave here soon enough.
We were visitors, we always knew,
even though the host welcomed us,
ushered us in, lit candles for us,
plied us with carafes of wine.

It would be a mistake, however,
to imagine we are free to stay
in this room with two doors,
drinking and eating, telling jokes,
exchanging stories for ever.

The wind swept us in through one door
and is pushing at the other.
Outside, it is waiting for us, running
impatient fingers through the trees,

waiting to take our hearts, browse through them
and toss them to the earth like finished leaves.

The blurb with Leaving Fingerprints has a first sentence which opens up so many lines of enquiry that it might be the start of prize-winning literary novel: Imtiaz Dharker was born in Lahore, Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay…. setting up perfectly the following wonderful poem of memory, reconciliation, forgiveness and familial love:

Green spiked hair

So I ran away from home with a man
from another country and a small suitcase
that contained a pair of pink suede shoes,
a passport, the condensed sayings of
Chairman Mao wrapped in red underwear
and a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire.

At Heathrow tens years after I had left
I met my father coming off a flight.
Hello? I said. He said Hello, polite as ever,
and walked on. I followed. Excuse me?
I’m your daughter? Ah, he said, not breaking step.
So are you well? And your family?
I’m afraid I need to go now
to catch a connecting flight.

A few years later at another airport
I catch up with him at last.
He had no memory of the incident
when an unknown woman with green spiked
hair accosted him in the transit lounge
claiming to be his little girl

the one he lost
the one who left with a suitcase and
his only copy of the poems of Faiz.

But in the arrival hall the lines come back to him,
Give some tree the gift of green again,
he says, smiling at the words or me,
Let one bird sing.

The green spikes in the hair of his daughter, Imtiaz, may be long gone, but she sings, how she sings.

There’s more about her work and how to obtain it at http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248491 Make sure to watch the short video that runs at the foot of  this link. It’s a brief understated masterclass in how to present poetry.