In what chair, Claire Armistead, dubs a “rare sighting”, Vikram Seth – author of A Suitable Boy, read from his new volume of poetry as he sipped sporadically on red wine. Each poem came with a grumbling murmur of approval from the audience, charmed by both his conversational wit and his poetic lyricism.

 

A Summer Requiem marks a move from Seth’s career as a novelist. The poems within have been written over 30 years, tracing Seth’s life and losses. Although Seth’s has an undeniably sunny disposition, and many of the poems he read are light-hearted and humorous, there is an undeniable melancholy of memory running throughout the works. He explained that poetry is bred in solitude and aloneness. When something negative happens, he said, “There is not much to do but write poetry and lose yourself in Bach and Burgundy.”

 

“I used to be intrinsically in love with unhappiness; I thought it was very romantic. Not so much anymore.”

 

He speaks of writing during warm Indian nights, “with the street dogs barking outside,” and the tranquil idyll of his English residence, The Old Rectory that was previously inhabited by George Herbert. Seth said of Herbert, “I love his poetry; it’s so unpretentious and there’s a lovely intimacy to it.” He compares the poet to John Donne, who, in his opinion, “was sometimes a bit of a show off.”

 

These are ideas that have translated into Seth’s own works published in A Summer Requiem. Armistead puts it to Seth that some of his poems pay half visible homage to his predecessors, like Blake and Keats. He humbly took this as a huge but rather worrisome compliment, adding, “I hope the spirit is still my own.”

 

Four of the poems included in the anthology bridge the gap between poetry and music. Music, Seth admits, is his first love: “If I went to a desert island I could do without literature, partly because some of it is in my head. But music? I want the pleasure of hearing it in my physical mortal ears.”

 

“Soul is the most important thing in any writing,” he encourages an audience member with poetic ambitions. He added, “There’s a lot of poetry I’ve written that I felt was awful, but objectively, really was awful.”

 

“But what do I know, I’m only the author and the authority of the author has to stop somewhere,” laughed Seth.

 

Photo: Elinor Williams
Text: Francesca Donovan