Leaving Fingerprints
by Imtiaz Dharker
Bloodaxe Books, £8.95
The poet, artist and documentary film maker Imtiaz Dharker was born at Lahore in 1954 to Pakistani parents who moved to Glasgow when she was less than one year old. She married Anil Dharker, an Indian Hindu, and their actress daughter Ayesha has appeared in films such as The Terrorist and Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, on stage in Bombay Dreams and on television as Tara Mandal in Coronation Street.
Imtiaz Dharker is now married to Simon Powell, founder of Poetry Live, divides her time between Mumbai and London and describes herself as a “Scottish Muslim Calvinist”. Her previous collections include Purdah, Postcards from God, I Speak for the Devil and The Terrorist at My Table and, like this new collection, contain poems about displacement, exile and religious strife.
Her observations are sometimes wry – as in the opening lines: “The whole world has shrunk / into a puzzle” – sometimes bleak – “The mud in this country / has a long memory” – and sometimes warm – as in these lines about sea shells: “And now you hold them up to let me hear / a whole world roaring in my ear” – but they are always sharp.
Here she is on poverty, addressing a child: “Of all the riches in the world / I would give you only this, / no silver spoon, but only this, / a simple way to know their lips, / to touch the hands / that handed down / the hand-me-down.”
She has a lovely turn of phrase – “Running water, passing snake. She shakes off / drops of what she has been, takes off the finished skin” and is very good on the spaces between what is said and left unsaid: “the questions I keep forgetting to ask.”
She’s also very good on love – especially lost love – and desire: “Time and wine made a net that pulled you back / to me one night, held you tight” and “I made a vice of my legs to hold your thighs, / I bound your eyes with kisses, knotted your hair / around the pegs of ‘Do you remember?’ / things we had done and places we had travelled to.” And in Ever Since she notes how a lover left his fingerprints on “the glass on my table / the bathroom tap / the handle of my door” and pleads: “Come back. / Leave / if you must. But before you leave, / leave / your fingerprints on my skin.”
Keith Richmond
About The Author
