Life often inserts itself and commands you (life sounds a lot like my wife) to continue sweeping the yard or dicing the onions, rather than stopping to write down your poem. So, many poems begin from a conjured memory, even if many are gifts of the present. 

Gavin Barrett

By Selma Carvalho

Gavin Barrett’s poetry has been published in Ranjit Hoskote’s anthology of 14 contemporary Indian poets, Reasons for Belonging (Viking Penguin, India); the journal of Pen India; The Folio; The Independent; The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, and Poeisis—the journal of the Bombay Poetry Circle. He was a Poetry Circle member from its very first meeting. His debut poetry collection is titled Understan (Mawenzi House, 2020)

In the black hours of night, great poetry is hard to define. It exists just outside our grasp, outside our understanding of a universe which defies explanation. It touches us gently, almost imperceptibly, constantly reaffirming our common ground. Barrett’s exceptional poetry collection Understan is the very definition of great poetry. Here in conversation with Barrett, we investigate his roots and creative process.

Selma Carvalho: Gavin, thank you for taking the time to talk to the JRLJ. I quote below from your collection, a poem titled, ‘I cannot leave you.’ I once carried that red gold sun/of the dust of bullock carts soft clopping home /in the dusk. I had the sun. This strikes me as a longing for a homeland left behind. Can you tell us about your growing up years, your connection to Goa if any, and when you emigrated to Canada?

Gavin Barrett: I am what I call a pocomomo—a postcolonial modern mongrel. I am Goan thanks to my mother and Anglo-Indian thanks to my dad and am fortunate to be claimed by both communities. Without meaning to sound precious, my lived experience contains many exiles. So there is always the yearning for Goa that many in the Goan diaspora feel. In the case of my own family, we are diasporic Goans in so many ways—Bombay Goans, East Africa Goans, and for me, since 1996, Canadian Goans. Goa is my Canaan. As a child, I was lucky to spend the May and October school vacations in Goa. We divided our time: a week at my great-grandmother’s in Assolna; a week (or two) in the vaddo of Baga in Velim with my grandmother Julieta (my grandfather Joao was not long with us after they returned from Dar es Salaam); a week or two in Colva, inhaling salt and seafood. My connection to Goa continues. I still have close family living there, and I return on average, every other year. I have no choice in this as Canadian imports of cashew feni seem to have ceased. And so, yes, I am a Goan emigré. I left India (and so Goa) in 1991 and, after about six years in Hong Kong, emigrated to Canada. I’ve been in Toronto since 1996.

SC: Poetry is possibly the most difficult literary form. Your style is difficult to identify. Despite the several Indian mentors and champions of your poetry that you acknowledge such as MG Vassanji and Ranjit Hoskote, and having been published extensively in India, I don’t get a sense that this is essentially Indian poetry. There is quite a lot of Catholic-inspired imagery (A congregation of weary faithful / saying their tear-salted novena), similar to English and Irish poets and artists, who were inspired by Christian canon, art and iconography. What were some of your early influences in poetry and why does so much of your verse draw from Catholicism?

GB: Guilty as charged. (I was born a Catholic after all.). To be honest, it is impossible to not be influenced by the idea of the sacred and its intersection with the profane if you come from India. One trips on religion wherever one turns, this shrine is sainted, that dirt is holy, that man is Bhagwan—God. Truthfully though, it is the mystic or monastic experience that is especially attractive to me because that interiority to me is holy space. Always a seeker hardly ever a finder, as in the title of Anne Sexton’s book, The Awful Rowing Towards God. Is my poetry Indian? This is a hard question for an emigré poet. I posit that Catholic Indian poetry is very much Indian poetry even if it is not familiar to those from other Indian communities. And in the same way it is very much Catholic even if all of it is not recognizable to Catholics from other countries. (I wonder how many novenas in childhood were rewarded with a humble celebration of boiled chick peas and salted wafers (crisps) as mine were in Bandra, Bombay.) At the same time, to grow up a Goan Catholic is to grow up Catholic. My Anglo-Indian father’s family was also Catholic—seven generations finding their way back to a single grave in Poona Cathedral. And to grow up Catholic and a poet—ah there is not escape. Yet oddly, protestants poets have had the strongest influence on me. John Donne is my poetic lodestone. I worship Emily Dickinson. Though in both those cases, I suspect it has more to do with maximal love and the centrality of doubt than with the certainty of faith. I also owe much to Gerard Manley Hopkins, TS Eliot and WB Yeats and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and Anne Sexton, Ntozake Shange, Pablo Neruda, Nissim Ezekiel (who taught me and almost published my first collection some 30 years ago), John Ashbery, my late friend Robert Flanagan, Seamus Heaney, Frost, Fenton. At the end of it all, I think I am—and my work is— more catholic than Catholic, reflecting my travels and a syncretism that is natural for someone hailing from India.

SC: I love the Ted Hughesque study of nature, beautifully observed, in all its minutia, for example in the splendid poem, ‘The Feeder’ (Whirlybird. / Shutterspeed flash and click/ of beak on feeder.) Tell us about this need for observation and reporting of the natural world and how great an influence it is on your poetry?

GB: I am delighted that you like that poem. I am gobsmacked by the natural world wherever I find it. I am an urban poet who can’t get enough of the natural world though I live in a city that is rich with nature. I am that goddamned fool who keeps recording videos of leaves in the wind. In February, in the dark of the midnight beach at Sernabatim, I thought I recorded a voice memo poem, as I held a handful of wet sand and a scintilla of bioluminescent plankton, but I think I may have been speaking excitedly to myself… almost certainly the result of a cashew feni shot of hallucinogenic potency. (The poem, if lost, gives me another reason to travel to Goa again when we rise after this current apocalypse.) The collision, the elision, of the human and the natural fascinates me, not least because what is human is, fundamentally, natural. That said, I am the world’s unhappiest camper.

SC: I find also your poetry is rooted in a deep sense of place. There are references which belong entirely to the geographical and cultural specificity of the western world. For instance. From ‘Million’s Girl’: Beautiful cars and fast women are the drink of men/ who cannot find their way/ to the north’s shining lights and /mired in the unzipped codes, stay/ in suburban pastoral nightmares/ culs de sac and telephone wires/ the cable trucks outside, on the driveway/ splitting the signal, always splitting the signal.

How has living in Canada influenced your poetry?

GB: I think Canada domesticated me in that I learned to enjoy the domestic. This is where I stopped, found my settled self. But it also introduced me to the wilderness, the Yukon, the aurora, Lake Louise, Cape Breton, whales. So I may be domesticated, but I don’t think I’m tamed, quite yet. That geographic specificity I owe to being the son of a merchant marine sailor and my childhood travels with him; the cultural comes from the deeply humanistic Jesuit education in anthropology I was privileged to receive.

SC: Family too figures prominently in this collection. Although many of them are love poems, others describe family dynamics. Does the poetry come at the moment of observation or later in a moment of introspection?

GB: Both, very much both, because life often inserts itself and commands you (life sounds a lot like my wife) to continue sweeping the yard or dicing the onions, rather than stopping to write down your poem. So, many poems begin from a conjured memory, even if many are gifts of the present. 

SC: I would be neglectful in my review, if I did not mention, this extraordinarily beautiful verse, titled ‘This Fall.’ (This book of ours, this red canoe times two, this boat of blades, this heart of spades, this smiling door, this body breaking on her shore, this drive in darkness, this railway station’s sharp elation…) It is such an exquisite blend of stream of consciousness, the perfect catalogue (to rival Virginia Woolf even), beautiful consonance, soft rhyme and alliteration. There is no dedication to this Epithalamion and perhaps it’s a poem in portraiture. Only one of these poems appears, the rest of the poems are more traditionally metered and the lines turned. Tell us a little about your creative process, your muse, your solitary time of writing, your preferred style in poetry.

GB: ‘This Fall’ is a poem written for an occasion, the wedding of one of my closest friends and it is not dedicated for two reasons. The first is privacy. The second, is because almost all my poems on love are, as you astutely observe, portraits—of love. They are complex composites of love’s many faces. 

About my process: I think when I write, I try to set myself in a state of grace – it seems profane to say that as so many of my poems are filled in different places with despair, rage or pure eroticism. But I mean “state of grace” not in a religious way but in the spiritual way - which strangely is not as banal as it sounds. Writing poetry is a compact with the mystical. You must be ready to receive. You have to be empty to be filled. With the spirit. Sometimes that spirit is Scotch. Or feni. In a sense, one receives poems. They are like the angels visiting Jacob. They appear, and then, after that one must wrestle with them. Being receptive, means I can’t have a routine, I am at the mercy of the poem. The routine emerges much later when the wrestling begins, and certainly, when fashioning a coherent collection. I tend to work best very late at night in my study at home but do I love writing outdoors in the summer, in my backyard. 

SC: It’s almost impossible for me to describe the beauty of your verse, your imagery, your gymnastics with the language. Are you fond of any other literary form—short story, flash, novel?

GB: I love literature in every form, and while poetry is my first love, I find myself flirting shamelessly with fiction in varying lengths.

SC: You are obviously a prolific writer of poetry. Do you have enough material for a second collection? What are you currently working on, and what’s next for you?

GB: Several things. My next two poetry manuscripts. A long article on the negative impact of the absence of communications to minorities during COVID19. A collection of short stories. A novel. And the next two sessions of the Tartan Turban Secret Readings, the literary reading series I run with the novelist Mayank Bhatt. A love poem to goa sausages and fresh bombil.

Banner image is by Uta Scholl and downloaded from unsplash.com

Understan is available for purchase here.