Review: Sidereal by Rachel Boast

First published in the Times Literary Supplement

The poems in Sidereal are full of people who cannot sleep. The opening lines of “Pinnacles” are characteristic of the exhausted wakefulness of Rachel Boast’s speakers: “And as there is no chance of sleep / you’ll spend the hours considering all the sounds / rain could be against the fabric of the tent ...”. Boast rearranges impressions and images like someone on the brink of sleep, merging Confucius, Canaletto and fencing terminology in another poem, but the effect is not dreamlike. She builds up “precision”, “skill” and “accurate intent” in the poem’s slender two-line stanzas until “you are ... / foregrounded in broad awareness”.

The attraction of night-time for Boast is, above all, the cosmos, and the parts of it which are not visible in sunlight. The epigraph from Samuel Taylor Coleridge strikes the keynote: “unmeaning they / As moonlight on the dial of the day”. It is fitting then that her collection takes its title from the sidereal day, which is based on the Earth’s relation to the stars rather than the Sun. She has a light touch with the technical language of astronomy, which she balances with conversational circumlocutions and anchors with plain, subtle rhymes. In “The Hum”, a poem about the process of writing, the effect is intimate:

Then in that way you have
When you persist, like a siderostat,
In fixing me in your view
What I’ve kept hidden becomes visible to you

A drawback of Boast’s sharp-witted, poised verse, however, is that she is too easily “habituated to the Vast”. The phrase, set in italics, is borrowed (again from Coleridge), and the feeling comes at several removes. Boast is most comfortable describing unwieldy emotions in the second person, as though addressing herself calmly. It is, perhaps, too easy to conclude “Agrarian Song”, a poem which captures the spirit of a warlike “god of the soil”, with a glance at the heavens: “Plant in me / the effort of your dark songs. / Constellate them”. But when the crotchety note of the long-term insomniac surfaces in her poems, Boast is more mischievous, even bracingly rude. She says “good riddance to the English apology” in the placidly titled “Peace and Plenty”: just what is needed to disrupt the solar system.

Recommends: Rabindranath Tagore

 
First published in Prospect (Issue 189)

Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Painter
Victoria & Albert Museum, 11th December-4th March, Tel: 020 7942 2000
 
The 150th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth this year has seen a resurgence of interest in his work. Yet two of his most prominent champions, Amartya Sen and Amit Chaudhuri, have complained that his poems—written in Bengali and difficult to translate—are under-read in the west.

Unlike his poetry, Tagore’s paintings do not suffer from the language barrier; he even declined to give them titles. An exhibition opening at the Victoria & Albert Museum in December offers another approach to this extraordinary figure, who had already won the Nobel prize for literature when he took up painting in his sixties.

Tagore’s early sketches—doodles he drew around the crossed-out words and revisions on his manuscripts—are some of his most immediate works. They show fantastical creatures, which he would later describe in a typically poetic fashion: “a bird that can only soar in dreams” or “a probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence.”

On loan from Visva-Bharati University, many of the paintings on show have never been displayed outside India, where Tagore’s work has been a major influence on artists such as Jamini Roy and Eleena Banik. This exhibition, one of only a handful in Britain since the 1930s, is a rare chance to appreciate Tagore first-hand.