Understan
Gavin Barrett
Mawenzi House, 2020
Review by Kate Rogers
Gavin Barrett’s poetry collection Understan takes the reader on a beautiful kaleidoscopic journey from Goa, India, throughout the various places he has lived, including Toronto and environs. The poems sojourn with his enduring love for his wife and his love for humanity. The poems in this multifaceted collection celebrate and satirize through lush description. Understan manifests Barrett’s multiple influences from T.S. Eliot to Arun Kolatkar in poems inspired by family, faith (Catholicism), racism, and social injustice.
Barrett is the founder and co-curator of the east-end Toronto-based Tartan Turban Secret Readings, the focus of which is giving emerging visible minority writers a stage. The name of Barrett’s reading series acknowledges the multiple strands of his identity: born in Bombay (now Mumbai) of Anglo-Indian and Goan-East African parentage, he has a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from St. Xavier’s College (in Bombay) and an M.A. in English Literature from Bombay University. He called Hong Kong home for several years before immigrating to Canada.
The title poem “Understan” is a good place for the collection to begin because it journeys through the narrator’s relationships with the places he has lived and those he loves. Memories flash by like glimpses through a moving train window:
A fresco mocks us.
It shows a couple cavorting in the first-class compartment
…voyeurs of the past
…stories that started yesterday
and end four thousand years ago.
Just as places leave imprints upon those who move through them, so do other people. Barrett himself has mentioned iconic Indian poets Arun Kolatkar and Nissim Ezekiel as important influences, alongside John Ashbery and T.S. Eliot. Many of Barrett’s poems in this collection, including “Million’s Girl,” show a wide-ranging free association reminiscent of Ashbery and Eliot, but the influence of Kolatkar and Ezekiel is equally clear.
In the article Intercultural transfer in the poetry of Arun Kolatkar, scholar Nora Selmani states that Kolatkar identified “…contemporary Indian culture as a culture of hybridity which is indebted to indigenous and colonial histories.” She describes the way that different Indian writers writing in English reference each other within their own works: “When Kolatkar writes ‘when I can call this city my own’, there are resonances of Ezekiel’s anxieties in [Kolatkar’s] ‘A Morning Walk’ about belonging…”
Several of Barrett’s poems in Understan express alienation in an urban environment similar to that of Ezekiel and Kolatkar. In “Pickering,” the narrator–out for a walk with his daughters –is surprised by the sight of the power plant east of Toronto: its “seventeen giant cooling towers…a city / a fabled khan might have built, ruled without pity”. The poet describes being taken by the city, shaken awake while “towers of silence…hiss and mock / electric shock.”
Barrett’s poems “A dog has years” and “Portrait of Oudh” appear to echo and extend the flâneur perspective in both T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and in Arun Kolatkar’s satirical poem in the voice of “Pi-dog”, a canine philosopher.
Eliot’s narrator invites the reader to wander the city. Like a curious dog, Eliot’s yellow fog “rubs its muzzle on the window-panes”.
From the middle of a traffic island, Kolatkar’s narrator ponders the city–its colonial ancestor fox hounds imported by Sir Bartle Frere in 1864 “with the crazy idea / of introducing fox-hunting to Bombay”. In his poem “A dog has years” Barrett’s narrator similarly observes the city with an eye to the canine:
a man and a dog
from my window.
The man is clog-shod, the dog shambling, happy, black,
wears a grey bearded smile.
The man shines, the leash if on is tender-slack.
The dog is a fur full of panting summer
The man is a skin of wine and song.
I am told they are teachers, man and dog.
Barrett uses his narrator’s walk with an iconic dog as a vehicle for philosophizing and reflecting on his origins: the idea of family as church, the echoing memories of drums beating, and a pot of curry on the stove.
In his poem “Portrait of Oudh”, Barrett returns to the dog’s perspective. Does the dog’s perspective allow Barrett’s narrator to view the world around him through his senses, as much as through his intellect and emotions? In “Portrait of Oudh” grey dogs guard a lady in a ruin in an “overgrown gully” where “a mind easily wanders off the path.” Dogs, like poets, are transported by the moment.
“This fall: Epithalamium”, a playful prose poem for Barrett’s marriage (and family), pulses with taut rhymes. It showcases the tumbling intensity so typical of Barrett:
This book of ours, this red canoe times two, this boat of blades, this heart of spades, this smiling door, this body breaking on her shore, this drive in darkness, this railway station’s sharp elation…this pain, this walk of thinking, this shrinking sinking, this rising singing, this piping skirl, this girl, this mother son, this father boy,…this lighted lake, this look, this eye, I, aye, oh yes, oui, we, this us…
The rush of free association in “This fall: Epithalamium” plunges the reader into the poet’s wide-ranging, deeply felt emotions. The breathless pace of this ecstatic poem leaves us gasping for more.
Another facet of Barrett’s kaleidoscopic lens is his faith: “Novena to St. X”, a poem in nine cycles (a significant twelve pages of his ninety-page collection), reflects on a childhood shaped by multiple religious and cultural influences in Goa, India. Barrett was raised as a Catholic, but never stopped being aware of other faiths and the injustice of surrounding poverty. Barrett’s Goan church of Saint Xavier challenges cultural assumptions in part i:
Onyx holds a cup of ashes
a paisley, the ripened mango of my childhood,
hanging from the Christmas tree.
Here in incongruous drifts of sand
white as snow.
The narrator bargains for a papier mache decoration for the church, and considers that “Somewhere a Ladakhi woman … must have chewed on this and / spat it out, newsprint staining her / lips black her / teeth missing gums aching.”
In part viii, the poet asks one of many church-challenging questions:
Are all the prophets men?
Ah, men.
I will call this angel trans-
figured
gendered.
Barrett challenges Western assumptions about what Christmas looks like with the mango on the Christmas tree and white sand, instead of snow. The way papier mache ornaments are made and by whom are not traditional considerations at Christmas, nor is the suffering caused by the patriarchal nature of the Catholic faith.
The most powerful poem near the end of the collection returns the reader to Barrett’s constant muse of family. In “My father the sailor in his eighties” the narrator recalls his idyllic youth, “At the fisherman’s cottage in Goa, / the beautiful moonshine stink of cashew feni” while recognizing his own future in his father’s present: “tremors / that will be mine”. He addresses his father with characteristic empathy, acknowledging his father’s surprise at the narrator’s own aging body:
surprise
that your hip broke, that your sight
is a collection of shadows from your past,
that your shoulder and wrist disagree.
Your body…like a…rickshaw driver at Bandra Station
who seems incapable of taking you
where you want to go…
The poet leaves us with his father’s eternal longing for home, which could mirror his own: “You want to go home, / and you are home”
I strongly recommend Gavin Barrett’s Understan for its passionate, compassionate, voyaging poems.
Kate Rogers (she/her) has poetry forthcoming in the two anthologies: The Beauty of Being Elsewhere and Looking Back at Hong Kong (Chinese University of Hong Kong). Her poetry recently appeared in the Quarantine Review, the Sad Girl Review: Muse, Heroine and Fangirl and the Trinity Review. Kate’s creative non-fiction essay “The Accident” can be found in the spring issue of The Windsor Review. Her work has also appeared in Poetry Pause (League of Canadian Poets); Understorey Magazine; World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal; Algebra of Owls; Juniper; The Guardian; Asia Literary Review; Voice & Verse; Kyoto Journal and the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology, among other publications. Kate’s reviews have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Prism International and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Her latest poetry collection is “Out of Place”, Aeolus House (Quattro Books), 2017. She repatriated to Canada in December 2019 after teaching college level language-through-literature for two decades in Hong Kong. Her work can be viewed at: https://katerogers.ca/