Poetry lessons from Charles Darwin

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. While writing a letter to a friend from college, the late David Foster Wallace came up with the line “Every love story is a ghost story", which later became the name of DT Max’s biography of Wallace. I was reminded of this line and its semantic genius (both love and ghosts are the sworn enemies of reason) more than once as I read Akhil Katyal’s recently released collection of poems, The Last Time I Saw You.

This is the 39-year Katyal’s fourth poetry collection, following Like Blood On the Bitten Tongue (2020), How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross (2019) and Night Charge Extra (2015). He has also written The Doubleness of Sexuality: Same-Sex Desire in Modern India (2017), a queer theory text that combines literary analysis with elements of historiography, sociology and activism. Katyal’s poems tend to favour classic themes: love, loss, longing and occasionally, belonging.

But like the Austrian poet Erich Fried’s work, the love poem is also a formal vessel for Katyal, through which he can talk about anything under the sun, really. In God Hasn’t Abandoned You, “trust is hung on walls/like old calendars". In Ordinary Things, he wryly describes a photographer’s practiced flattery: “Like when teachers say ‘interesting’/to a colleague’s remark,/he offered only non-committal compliments".

Poems like Day Eleven of Learning Italian and Reading Rilke’s ‘Love Song’ in German are informed by his work as a translator, while the titular verse is one of those love poems destined to be widely anthologized. Edited excerpts from an online interview. I wished to see ‘grief’ from many disciplinary lenses.