The changing nature of grief | Review of Jeet Thayil’s new poetry collection, ‘I’ll Have It Here’

Jeet Thayil's new poetry collection, "I'll Have It Here," delves into grief, politics, and personal elegies with poignant articulation.

Jeet Thayil’s necro-poems in These Errors are Correct (2008) that lament the premature passing of his wife Shakti Bhatt, and which later went on to win the Sahitya Akademi Award, introduced us to a poet nursing his intimate wounds. That was supposed to be his last book. 

But a few years later, a hardbound edition of his new and selected poems with a cover in dulcet brown and striking red and yellow became a sensation. In its preface, however, Thayil proclaimed with his characteristic flamboyance that [These Errors…] “is the last full-length collection of poems I intend to publish”.

Thus, the publication of I’ll Have It Here, his new poetry collection, comes as a delectable surprise. Considerably so, as, his ardent followers would agree, the despondent veil of not being able to ‘equal or improve on your last book’ has lifted — and, oh boy, with such a dazzling comeback. 

Grief occupies centrestage again, which, if we were to think of Philip Larkin’s The Trees, makes sense. This greenness of grief — its ever-returning nature — remains one of the most haunting expressions. However, Thayil’s articulation has become more outwardly, immediate, and politically-themed.

Sample these:

The climate is in crisis, to breathe is 

to ache in India.