Book review: Not Elegy, But Eros by Nausheen Eusuf

Reviewed by Dr Faustina Pereira

Title: Not Elegy, But Eros
Author: Nausheen Eusuf
Publisher: NYQ Books (US) and Bengal Lights Books (Bangladesh)
Pages: 88 (NYQ); 94 (BLB)

It has been at least two decades since my university days that I made time to go through a poetry collection as mindfully as I have recently. It is no accident that it is the newly published collected works of Nausheen Eusuf, Not Elegy, But Eros, that helped me emerge out of my doldrums on the poetry front. The title certainly played its part in drawing me to this new work. It was not long before I delved into it properly, that the full spectrum of what was on offer became apparent. Here was a fresh new voice of a global citizen who stirs up emotions against a universal backdrop which nevertheless reverberate at an individualised, atomic and primal level. Who would not be able to identify, in their own way, with, for example, the language of the trees that ‘held court with the birds, and drowsed at noon with the dragonfly’ or marking the passage of time through a thousand moons that ‘fattened and fell’?

Let me clarify at the outset that when I learned that the poet was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I was intent on picking up deshi points of attachments from the get go. Part I, which barely contained the reference points I was looking for, initially almost disappointed. Then, of course, I came to “Ubi Sunt”, which chants an ode to the ‘ordinary sacraments’ of everyday life that are at once deeply personal and yet inherently universal. A poem woven intricately through shiny red seeds of sandalwood and garlands of jasmine freshly fallen after a night of rain, assures us of a continuity with all those who have gone before us and reminds us that sometimes the answer we are ‘hoping to find, if not what I seek, at least something that might suffice.’ “Ubi Sunt” is quickly followed by other gifts of homely indulgences – from the dining room and its many flourishes in “Musee Des Beaux Morts” to the almost delicious smell of Kiwi shoe polish and the rich feel of stiff-bristled horsehair brushes in “Shining Shoes”. What I found interesting in this particular clutch of poems is a quiet elusiveness of the poet herself. If it is by design, then it is pulled off cleverly – to invite the reader to such an intimate sanctum, yet remaining just beyond the line of visibility.