Telling Twilight by M. Athar Tahir. Published by the University of the Punjab (Lahore), 2024
M. Athar Tahir is a retired civil servant, a multi-faceted writer, the recipient of many awards for his English language poetry, fiction and essays, his critical work on Punjabi literature and his work as art historian and calligrapher.
His literary engagement has continued to develop and expand and, as a Pakistani English poet, he has explored and employed different literary forms, including the qasida, the haiku and the sonnet.
This year, Tahir has received The Pakistan Academy of Letters’ prestigious Daud Kamal Award for English poetry for Telling Twilight: Seven Score Sonnets. The very title of this rich, multi-layered and lyrical collection is imbued with resonances, including the passage of time. Added to this, the sub-title, knowing described by the old-fashioned phrase Seven Score [7×20] has metaphorical innuendoes including the spiritual, literary, historical and mathematical. The sonnet itself, a 14-line poetical form, which originated in 13th century Europe, evolved from themes of love by mediaeval poets to wider topics by modern writers: both concepts are employed by Tahir create a literary engagement across centuries.
In Telling Twilight, several sonnets engage with the Sufi poets Jalaluddin Rumi, Mansurul Hallaj, Sarmad Kashani, or timeless legends such as Laila Majnu. Many poems, written in the first person, address the loved one in the second person, revolve around romance/longing/loss symbolize themes of the lover/seeker and the beloved/divine in Sufi poetry. This adds to the intercultural, timeless dimensions of Tahir’s sonnets; it also suggests links to the mystical Arabic poetry, prevalent in Muslim Spain (al Andalus), which inspired Europe’s first vernacular poetry, the troubadour or courtly love poetry of 12th century Provence and which influenced, in turn, the creation of the sonnet, a century later.
In his informative “Introduction” to Tahir’s collection, Dr. Faisal Nazir refers to the sonnet’s inception at the Court of King Frederick of Sicily (1194-1250CE), and its spread across Europe, where within its 14-line structure, its deca-syllabic lines and definite rhyme schemes developed “innovations and variations” by leading poets ranging from Dante and Petrarch to Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Donne and WH Auden. Nazir also provides many insights into Tahir’s interest in writing sonnets over the years, although Telling Twilight is his first sonnet collection.
The book consists of sonnets written between December 2016 and June 2022, duly numbered with only a few encapsulated further by a sub-title. Many are imbued with an interlinking of cultures, continents and natural life. The very first, “Sonnet I: Koh Samet,” evokes the Thai island and its turquoise waters and white sandy beaches, which once existed in the mythical world of “the Mermaid,” a quiet reference to a figure associated with the Koh Samet island in Thai legend. This, in turn, indicates the mermaid as a magical, romantic, figure in folklore, beyond western traditions. The symbolic references to the “kris,” a Thai dagger, the sea’s churning movements, the erosions caused by time and human activities, become an allegory to the narrator’s tale of love, longing and loss.
Tahir continues to portray water and water-life, amid other aspects of nature, to echo mankind’s dreams and limitations, earthly and spiritual. In “Sonnet XXXII”, set in a nameless location, imagining being the sea itself, discovering a different world ranging from “the mermaid’s sea-weed hair with coral/Beads red with love for a prince,” to glimpses of floating light, “floral/Movement among fishes and rocks” entwined with a yearning for beloved, hampered by self-doubt, suggests mystical aspirations and elisions.
In “Sonnet XXXV: Perfume Sonnet” the sensory resonances of perfumes, merged with creativity, evoke images of passing clouds, fireflies, surf and sand and bring to life complex emotions and memories. Several sonnets, entwine quiet references to the monsoon, with personal aspirations and uncertainties, ranging from the joy, romance and hope that the rainy season symbolizes to the realities of devastating downpours, torrents and floods. More unexpectedly “Sonnet CXXV,” which moves across the seasons, provides witty twist to Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Telling Twilight celebrates two legendary Chinese writers in “Sonnet CXV: Du Fu (712-770 CE)” and “Sonnet CXVII: Li Po (701-762 CE)”. There are references to Dante and Savaronola in “Sonnet CXIV: Firenze” about their home city. Other poems engage with Sufi writers or lore. This includes “Sonnet XI: Lotus Sonnet” which evokes images from Rumi’s masnavi while “Sonnet XLII: Rumi” becomes a song of praise for the poet/mystic. Interestingly, while an earlier poem “Sonnet XXIV” tells of the narrator’s quest for love, identifying with that of legendary figures of Adam, Sohni and Majnu, a later poem “Sonnet LXXVII” dwells on the passage of time as the aging narrator contemplates twilight and the silence and suffering that reminds him of Majnu’s madness, the brutal killings of the Sufis, Hallaj and Sarmad and the trials of the young, Gautama before he became Buddha.
The collection is also remarkable for its cohesion and the number of subjects its spans, public and/or personal, including travel, ecology, history and daily life. Tahir employs sub-titles to advantage to highlight specific topics: he captures modern communications in “SMS Sonnet”; he contemplates literature and writing in “Poems”, “Words”, “Scripts” respectively; a sequence of four sonnets “Wrestler I” to “Wrestler IV” captures different stages of a wrestler’s life from childhood to retirement. In fact the experience of growing older, the twilight years, is built in gradually.
“Sonnet LIV: Stent Sonnet” written in June 2018, captures the narrator’s cardiac problems and angiography. Subsequently, several sonnets written at different points in time, refer to ailments and age. “Sonnet LXXVI: Aging” begins “Each day subtracts a little of the spring/In the step, the eyes’ clarity and hands’/Steady grip. Despite my smiled posturing/I now make fewer and fewer demands.”
An increasing number of sonnets refer to prayer, spirituality, inner peace. Some contemplate life and death: “Sonnet CXXII” written in January 2021 begins “From Him one comes and to Him one returns/Willingly or not, in deceased decline/Or sudden accident, of His design/Or plain old age”. The poem goes on to consider the past, the days to remember, and much that was missed, culminating with the words: “The heart returns to songs long left unsung/And the mind turns to catch life’s slipping worth/Sounds of the earth are a celebration/An old hand lifts the cup to lips still young/Each in its own way belongs to this earth.”
Telling Twilight is also imbued with very fine poems devoted to Tahir’s family. The earliest—in fact the collection’s second poem—“Sonnet II: Sonnet for Samia” is dedicated to his wife, Dr. Samia Malik. Another poem, “Sonnet XXXVI: Sonnet for Aanya” written a few months later, celebrates the birth of Tahir’s first grandchild beginning with the words “I could come bearing gifts like the Magi.” it is filled with blessings for the child’s future. In marked contrast, two later sonnets “LXII: Mother’s Letters” and “Sonnet LXX: Mother’s Cabin Trunk”, both written in memoriam to his late mother, Mrs. Razia Tahir, are imbued with memories and capture vividly the worlds she inhabited.
Tahir also writes of early years in several poems including “Sonnet CXXVII: East Pakistan” and “Sonnet CXXV: 225 MacAlister Road” which reflect on memories of his childhood in Dhaka and Penang respectively, during his father’s postings there. The collection’s final “Sonnet CXXXX: Srebinca” written in June 2022, the suffering Bosnia embodies that of many lands, culminating with lines “This Bosnian wood could be Rakhine, or/Palestine or the Kashmir Valley, or…” which in turn give voice not only to the suffering of our world but a concern for humanity, beyond borders and boundaries and time.
Indeed, Telling Twilight is a significant collection, adding to Tahir’s skilled and extensive oeuvre and its universalism.