Lesley Sharpe considers poems of exile and reclamation. This review was first published in The Alchemy Spoon 12, Summer 2024

Laboni Islam Trimming the Wick, ignition press, £6 

Laboni Islam’s pamphlet Trimming the Wick gathers family stories to chronicle the aftershocks of political upheaval. These are poems which navigate the impact of Partition, familial dislocation, and the perilous impact of climate change on low-lying Bangladesh. Again we find the rituals that defy darkness, but it is water and salt which frame the opening poem ‘Salt’ and form much of the pamphlet’s subsequent imagery. ‘Salt’ offers, with its Lear-like myth, an atmosphere of peril and an old moral pattern, so that the narrator’s father ‘learned salt’s use by its absence’. But the moral quickly turns on itself to devastating effect, for ‘these days, the sea adds salt to everything’, a different legacy: ‘moving inland, salting the fields so rice stops growing,/ salting the wells, so water is undrinkable.’ In ‘Low-Lying Country’, the sea level rises ‘like fever’, and ‘to live alluvially near three rivers rising’, or in overwhelmingly crowded slums, is to ‘choose// between catastrophes.’ 

            The poet weaves into this intensity of crisis the narrator’s conflicting emotions. Positioning her poem ‘Recolouring the Map’ between Toronto and Dhaka, she aligns herself with water, being

                   of that age between stream and sea

when I felt the levees of my life

         most keenly.

Exploring the tension between a sense of familial origin and ‘western learnings’ in ‘Waterlilies’, the narrator discovers ‘My mother is an original/ and I, a hybrid bloom’, her own mind a ‘rough canvas – stretched, primed – /filled with university lectures – ’. The poet honours her mother’s memories, stored like a seed in the singular and freighted word shapla, which conjures for the mother the lost world of a garden, veranda, a folding chair. With similar economy and vividness, other poems capture tales about a parrot that ‘preened on a slim perch/ate red chilies, lived calmly’ (‘The Parrot, East Pakistan c.1958’), or, in ‘Echoes, Assynt’, her father’s travels to Scotland, itself a postcard of ‘a trench coat’ and two mountains which ‘keep records of their past’. But, ultimately, the scale of disruption which shapes this innovative and moving sequence leaves the reader with the enduring image, in the poem ‘Hurricanes’, of a mother ‘holding history like a hurricane/ whose wick she trims and trims’.