WHAT FURTHER pain can the future promise/To a wandering exile from heart to heart?” As the seasons shift, Vikram Seth, poet first, novelist later, takes us through the ceaseless “gather and scatter, gather and scatter” that is life, complete with philosophical laments about the future.

The first poem, the eponymous Summer Requiem, is a long one, in free verse. It’s dense in parts, but incredibly lucid, too, as it deals with love, loss, memory and the state of being it reduces one to. “I have so carefully mapped the corners of my mind/That I am forever waking in a lost country,” Seth writes. Then again, “The shell of forgetfulness has broken sharply,/The harmony warped in my hands./Jaggedness and discontinuity, as if the pebbles/Smoothed by centuries were crushed again.”

Seth is drawn to nature, to dawn and dusk, those crepuscular states when it could be a beginning or an end. In that sense, it’s as if he has purposely chosen the word ‘requiem’ to mean that it is an end of something and hence there is an innate sense of loss.

This collection, his first in more than two decades, appears as we wait for him to finish A Suitable Girl, the sequel to his famous 1993 novel A Suitable Boy, which has already been delayed by three-odd years and has now been promised in the summer of 2016. Is the delay because he “simply can’t get out of bed”? Seth goes on to write, “ I hate my work but I am in the red./I’d quit it all if I could live on air”, but then we know it’s just a minor hurdle because he simply must get out of bed and “press that reset button in my head”… In fact, there’s a short prayer for his novel: “….Let me, by grace enlivened and by skill,/Enliven those who lived, and those who will.”

For the rest of the poems, Seth reverts to the rhyme and metre verse, with familiar themes of love and loss, and birds and trees, and walks. There’s the seemingly effortless “The moon will die,/Earth, evening, you and I./There are no fixtures in the sky/Free from the growing past” and the rather ordinary “I love

you more than I can say/Try as I do it hasn’t gone away”. Some of the most beautiful lines are reserved for the walks: “One morning when the world was dark/My feet led me towards the park./A blackbird

sang an easy tune./A contrail underlined the moon….And as I breathed the callous air/I lost the drift of my despair.”

The loneliness is overwhelming in many of the poems, especially in Evening Scene from my Table: “My friends have left, and I can see/No one, and no one will appear./This must be happiness, to be/Sitting alone with birds and beer.” But then again, there’s a sense of calm as well, an acceptance of solitude and sadness: “It gives me pleasure to remember and/To count the stages of my sorrow”.

This collection is by no means his best, the poems may not be as well-knit as those in All You Who Sleep Tonight, for instance, but this is familiar Seth territory, which can’t be a bad thing.

Sudipta Datta is a freelancer