RUNNING OUT OF WORDS FOR AFTERWARDS

Poems of creation and destruction located in the earthly and spiritual worlds feature in this collection.

In his debut book of poems, including many previously published in literary magazines, Hargreaves draws, in part, on his translation of contemporary Nepalese poet Durga Lal Shrestha’s works in The Blossoms of Sixty-Four Sunsets (2014). His own “Sense and Reference,” set in Patan, Nepal, pairs two columns of stanzas; at left, the poet recounts a conversation with a Nepalese friend working out the meanings of mākhu, a word for many disparate flavors, such as those of bananas, rice flakes, and avocados. He doesn’t get it, concluding that “Clearly, I have no taste / and no clue.” On the right-hand side, a column in italics describes birds and animals above and around a temple carved with erotic images, said to protect the temple from “the prudish / virgin goddess of lightning.” Like many other poems in the book, this one contrasts the mundane—a tea stall, a snack—with the numinous while also drawing connections between them. The mystery of taste, the birds and monkeys living their animal lives, the sculptured tantric couplings, the casual conversation effectively intertwine like the words of a poem itself. The poet explores other seeming dualities in other works, including birth and death, fate and chance, and the natural and human-made worlds; there is a clear sense of longing for connection as well as images of thirst, hunger, and desire. Although one poem (“News at Eleven”) employs the hendecasyllable meter of classical poetry, most are written in free verse that’s lushly allusive yet chiseled to essentials. The prosody is marked by pleasing alliteration and assonance, as in “Now & Then,” in which the K and T sounds in “O’ Kālī, O’ Time” ripple through the poem (“taught us / to tally”; “chit / for each goat”; “match goat to chit”).

Remarkably well-crafted verses that feel alive to the fullness of experience.