For 45 minutes, Imtiaz Dharker, who was described by Carol Ann Duffy as the best contender for Poet Laureate of the World, transformed the North Wall into a storytelling haven that took us around the world. Perhaps it’s her other life as a documentary film-maker for NGOs that’s responsible, but Dharker is a natural storyteller, her introduction to poems as magnetic as the poems inside. Take her ad-lib description of a phone as ‘carrying in your palm everyone you love’, or her description of poetry ‘as a kind of eavesdropping on the world’. It’s even more impressive considering that she read in a very simple set up, alone on a stage, her small frame almost entirely swallowed by a pulpit – she only needs her voice to keep the audience's attention.
There was a theme of Dharker describing the act of hearing something again and again until it becomes a rhythm. This kicked off in her reading of ‘Speech Balloon’ with the refrain of ‘I’m over the moon’ and ended with her description in the Q&As of having to learn the Qu’ran by rote as a child until it became an internal song. Rhythmic is certainly how I would describe Dharker’s reading itself, who knows how to shade a poem into different sections, accelerating here, slowing us down elsewhere, releasing each phrase with intent. No poetic voice here, and if is employed, it is knowingly and with a wink.
While Dharker’s poems could be described as mainstream – there is little experimentation to be found here – they are not without spark or oddity. Deadpan and witty humour can be found in abundance. In the aforementioned ‘Speech Balloon’, she concludes of all the people over the moon that ‘All the happy people have left this world’, taking us into a place of surreality where footballers and lottery winners and proud parents are all in outer space.
Sentient furniture, pomegranates, and the lack of drinking water in Bombay all feature in other poems – but it’s her love poems that delight especially. From her ode to her late husband’s silver tongue, whose ending rippled through the audience, to her retelling of Shakespeare’s 'Sonnet 43' which, like the original, takes reality and tilts it into a dream mingled with grief. It begins:
‘In a wasted time, it’s only when I sleep
that all my senses come awake. In the wake
of you, let day not break’
Her final poem, ‘I swear’ is perhaps the most poignant yet also the one that made the audience laugh the most. It details her late husband teaching her the swear versions of expressions, such as ‘you never just fell, you went arse over tits’, and it culminates in a furiously moving ‘And I tell you, since you went it’s a pain in the arse’.