he Last Tea
Author: M Athar Tahir
In his latest offering, the prolific Athar Tahir, one of the last bastions of the old guard of Pakistani poetry, goes the way the Imagist seems to invariably be drawn to: the Far East. China and Japan have held a certain intellectual glamour for poets across the ages, from Ezra Pound to Vikram Seth. The entire Imagist movement grew from Pound and his contemporaries’ fascination with Far Eastern classical poetry: the precise, crystalline grace of the Chinese haiku or Japanese tanka, a form similar to the set syllabic form of haiku. While a poet like Seth would not traditionally be classified as an Imagist, Athar Tahir’s work has always circled that particular periphery, and The Last Tea is an unabashed dive into the form.
The book begins with a collection of work that is more familiar; poems spare and vivid, capturing a slowly greening rice field, a goatherd calling his flock home, airport farewells. This landscape, moving from home to home, city to village and back, is known territory for anyone even slightly acquainted with Tahir’s sensibility. The second and third halves of the book, however, heralded by the cover — a detail from an 18th century Japanese print, flanked by the title of the book in Japanese calligraphy — is what one is really waiting for.
Comparing one poet to another is a patently unfair, albeit common practice. When an elegantly spare poet follows the legacy of those before him and is fascinated by Far Eastern poetry, the comparisons between them and the likes of Pound become even more predictable. Happily, in this instance, the comparisons can stop there. Tahir seems to come into an entirely different self in the latter portions of The Last Tea. Leaving the dust and rain of South Asia behind, he steps into an entirely different world, almost as if from out of a mural and into a miniature. This is a world of sharp, clear images, a world of snow and robes rustling, the clink of a tea bowl. Even the birds that feature in ‘Haiku aviary’ (it is not called ‘aviary’ for no reason) are nothing like the usual ones we know: there are woodpeckers and sparrows, a koel in a pipal and a vulture but all are rendered elegant by the form they have been rendered in. In a way, Tahir’s verse becomes a single-haired paintbrush or a calligrapher’s pen, sketching in a few lines an entire narrative much like the way Chinese is written, where the word follows the image of it and a line flicked upwards or downwards can transform rain into a storm.
Take, for instance, ‘Vulture’:
“Always beyond reach,
Descends to peck and pick flesh
Soul and bones. So clean.”
Being haiku it follows the usual 5-7-5 syllable pattern with the requisite three lines. But a lumbering, bald, hunched vulture has been transformed into something sleek and focused, elusive and determined. Three strokes of a pen and vive la difference! Tahir is onto something here and this reviewer at least is very intrigued by it.
‘Japan journal’ moves away from the familiar trees of Aikman Road and their inhabitants to the small white butterflies and cherry blossoms in Tokyo. Employing either the 5-7-5 syllable pattern of what is called the upper phase in tanka poetry or the longer, 5 line 5-7-5-7-7 form, ‘Japan journals’ is an ode to the country. Twenty one verses are devoted to sakura, or cherry blossom, alone. In their healing, rejuvenating midst the poet seems to be finding new life and evidently a whole lot of inspiration with it:
“Not all potions can
What this single blossomed-branch
Does to heal a heart” (Sakura 13).
The longer verses are increasingly meditative with more of Tahir’s original voice finding space to speak. Poems like ‘Parting tanka’ and ‘Life tanka’ dwell on the fleeting intersection of lives and the role of language in the connections one forms between one’s own tongue and another’s. The two ‘Sayonara’ poems (Japanese for goodbye) are in the same vein: wistful, ‘Japanese breath’ becoming a part of the poet as he says farewell to a land he knows only through translation but also through the air that has come and gone within him.
The title poem, ‘The last tea’, is the grand finale of the book and what a fitting farewell it is. Inspired by the death of 16th century courtier Sen no Rikyu, ‘The last tea’ is unlike anything Tahir has written before. Sentenced to death by the powerful feudal lord Rikyu was friend to, the poem is an account of the last tea ceremony Rikyu performs. It is a doubly poignant scene because Rikyu is credited with perfecting the Japanese tea ceremony. The poem starts with Rikyu preparing for his guests, sweeping his cell, lighting incense, visualising the garden through which he imagines his guests walking through to reach him. Each word is as carefully placed as each pebble in a Japanese garden, each image finely balanced. Rikyu’s own poise and restraint is reflected in that of the three-line stanzas: “a life-long study finds expression now”, both for tea-master and authoring poet. This is Rikyu’s finest tea ceremony: the arrangement of the coal, the metal so placed in the kettle to make the water sing, the carefully selected tea leaves “creased like old leather”. It is a long poem indeed, spanning 10 pages of Rikyu’s meticulous ceremony, its conduction and his end, by his own hand in the traditional hara-kiri way. ‘The last tea’ is a beautiful, haunting close both to a remarkable man and a successfully experimental book.
The reviewer teaches at LUMS