The most exciting discovery of the Faber New Poets scheme to date, Zaffar Kunial imbues the tiny things of life and nature in both of these collections with a love that gives them an epic quality. Language is an intense preoccupation for this poet who grew up between Midlands English and the obscure Kashmiri dialect of his father, a vernacular which appears to have never been written down. Kunial mines the two languages for the surprising convergences that hint at deeper commonalities. This interest is sometimes earnest and profound, at other times gnomic and playful such as in Us’s The Still, which identifies the pleasing resonances between 'Jabberwock,' the poet Jabir of the Haroun-al-Rashid Golden Age caliphate, and the word 'gibberish.' Kunial is clearly more in touch with his childhood self than most people, and is able to summon up that sensation of cogitating deeply about bright new words, their shapes and sounds. His poems have a crystalline quality, as if each word has been chosen with extreme care, like a jewel considered from all different angles.
Cricket is an enduring love of Kunial’s, a preoccupation that comes up repeatedly in the form of a fateful path not taken. This is evoked hauntingly in the first poem in Us, Fielder, about a game of cricket in which he discovers the ball glowing like a tiny world just out of sight in the undergrowth, in a moment of strangely arrested time that brings to mind a similar magical suspension in Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop. For Kunial, in retrospect, this formed the moment when he diverged from his youthful ambition of one day playing for county or country, a turning-point echoed by Leg Glance and England in England’s Green. (In the latter poem he points out wistfully that the national vice-captain Moeen Ali is from his neighbourhood.) In a project combining poetry and cricket, Kunial was resident poet at The Oval, and produced a collection of cricket poems entitled Six.
Family, its love and trouble, is Kunial’s most important theme: the difficult relationships between himself and his father and between his parents, but most of all the transformative love of his schoolteacher mother Julia (to whom, as well as his infant son, both books are dedicated) for her timid little boy. There is filial guilt at being more at home in the Midlands than his Kashmiri father Abdul in The Word, and a reflection on the psychological burden that Abdul’s postcolonial resentment placed on him in I, which reveals that his father had named after the tragic last king of India, imprisoned by the British. (It was, for other reasons, a difficult name to have. The infant Zaffar couldn’t pronounce it and kept calling himself Faffer, which his mother dryly pronounced appropriate.) At low points his father blamed his small mother for colonial-era injustices, though, as Kunial points out, she was born in the year of India’s independence. Julia is the most important figure in both collections, a constant presence whether explicit or implied. Prayer in Us contains an enormously poignant deathbed scene, full of her son’s gratitude to her for life and love, but regardless of theme she is never far away.
There are evocative childhood memories in The Wardrobe about remembering the excitement created by C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe —especially in the cartoon version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe— which blends into a memory of regularly taking down the family Quran from the top of another wardrobe and questing about in its English margin commentaries, which leads to the admission that Kunial has often wandered through bookshops without really knowing what he is looking for. Elsewhere in Us, a happy memory of listening to the radio programme Just A Minute with his mother in Birmingham is complemented by a reminiscence of hearing his father tell a tall tale partly in Kashmiri dialect, while The Long Causeway, about a road trip in winter with his little son, marvellously evokes a sense of place and magic with its swirling snowflakes.
Kunial’s experience of being (on his father’s side) a second-generation immigrant (a completely illogical term used in this review for want of a better; one cannot immigrate to the country of one’s birth) is reflected in Ys, a recollection of being grabbed by and reflected in the famous opening line of The Buddha of Suburbia which then delves into Old English, a consistent fascination for Kunial. This poem, which concludes Us, is one of the most powerful in the collection, developing into a childhood dialogue with Kunial’s mother about his father’s absence on a long visit home; the child Zaffar’s attempt to expedite his father’s return involves a conceit too touching to be given away here. Empty Words combines a feeling of uprootedness with the Anglo-Saxon lament Deor, while Stamping Grounds (Earlier) is a moving evocation of finding his English family roots via the (to a child) fascinating fact that Kunial's grandfather Stanley Arthur Evetts’ initials also spelled Stamped Addressed Envelope. The latter poem is present in two different versions, Earlier and Later, and there are also two poems called Empty Words, the second containing meaningful and comical collisions between English and other languages —'mouse' versus the Sanskrit for thief, mus, for example— as well as a musing on the directions of script in different cultures (his mother writing from west to east and his father in the opposite direction, to meet each other in the middle), and the Tolkienesque point that Anglo-Saxon runes look like tree branches.
While Kunial’s mixed cultural heritage constantly highlights commonalities for him, the habit of constant observation and comparison that it brings with it also helps him to notice cultural continuities that elude other writers. In A Drink at the Door, in which he connects the old-fashioned light of the pub in which he is sipping his malt, refracted by the mahogany wood that surrounds him, to the imagined light in the Dickens novel that he is reading and the pubs run by his British ancestors, Kunial conjures up an image of generations surrounded by this warm interior light. (This awareness of continuity explains his choice of T.S. Eliot’s line "History is now, and England" to open the poem England in England’s Green.) One of the most brilliant works in Us, Poppy, revives the Great War image of the flower as the soldier’s resurrection, the mouths of poppies speaking for the dead in an echo of Canadian poet John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields. The poem then explores the resonances of this magical flower in other countries in an almost incantatory, deeply moving reflection that ultimately returns to the national grief of the War.
In Us, Kunial has woven a deeply meaningful tapestry of different languages, people, and places, and the collection achieves what we hope for from poetry, going a substantial way towards answering fundamental questions of what it means to be human —partly due to Kunial’s rare gift for expressing thoughts that are extremely difficult to crystallise in words. Overall the poetry in Us captures the poet working through the challenges of family history, the title poem expressing a wistful hope to make an Us out of disparate roots and origins against the centrifugal forces of separation and loss.
England's Green, his second major collection, seems to be a positive answer to this poem’s implied question as to whether this is possible; in a video to accompany the book's release Kunial diffidently proposes that England's history as a very old country doesn't have to imply being exclusionary. Kunial’s lockdown project, it is a reflection of much time spent outdoors, and it intensifies the pastoralism and the emotional heft of the previous collection. It constantly refers back to Us and repeats some of that volume’s imagery, so that the two collections cannot really be considered apart and instead form a palimpsest. Here Kunial delves deeper into family history. He returns to the theme of the Great War in Bascote Heath, Long Itchington, which chronicles a visit to the Cenotaph to remember two unburied fallen ancestors, one lost near Basra, and one at the Somme after the famous Christmas truce —a father and son, both limestone quarrymen. Kunial stands transfixed amid the London traffic for two hours to commune with them, while looking at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This poem is moving for obvious reasons, but other works in the volume are more obscurely touching, such as O’ about Kunial’s Irish ancestors on the English side of the family, in which a spinning coin from a coin trick is compared to the patronymic O’ of Irish surnames. (One point that Kunial is particularly anxious to make in this collection is the diversity of his antecedents on the English side: Shetland, Orkney, Ireland.)
The nature poetry in this volume is truly wonderful, unsentimental and immediate. Green combines this pastoralism with Kunial’s love of his mother —who once spent hours searching for a four-leaf clover for her anxious son to take to exams— in a deeply sad account of walking past the family home following her death and wake. (Tolkien, an implied presence in the first volume, finally appears by name in this poem.) The emblematic four-leaf-clover incident appears again in Thinnings, which summons a host of English butterflies to evoke Kunial’s fragile tiny mother’s transient life: Clouded Yellow, Ghost Swift, Small Copper. Forget Me Not is a superbly lyrical love poem, while Hedge, which follows it, reflects on the most distinctive feature of the English landscape and invites the reader to consider all the things that hedges might hide: other dimensions, or even the whole world? Hawthorn summons the scent of the tree at the start of warm weather, and is followed by The Newly BredRose, which brilliantly evokes that mythical English summer which, as the poet notes, seems always to be just out of reach, beyond the horizon.
The beauty of the natural world inspires Kunial to unprecedented heights of technical innovation in This in Land, which uses an initially impenetrable syntax to capture the fluttering of butterflies, the luminescence of moss, and the reflection of a church steeple in water. Foxglove Country was the poem through which this reviewer first discovered Kunial: it is magical, gnomic, and tender, using linguistic differences and similarities to contrast and connect fatherland with motherland. Ings, the masterpiece of this collection, references J. L. Carr’s luminous novella of absolution A Month in the Country. In it, the poet’s grief ambushes him out of nowhere during a spontaneous visit up a church tower in a tiny English village like the one in Carr’s story. The poem’s sorrowful snowdrops, their bent heads nodding over tombstones in the churchyard, have as much personality in their own bereaved way as Wordsworth’s triumphant daffodils, and form a perfect counterpoint to them.
While sorrow for Kunial’s mother is a persistent theme in England’s Green, the collection is also leavened by moments of delight and humour, such as when the poet —in another Tolkien reference— calls his baby an Inkling. Invasive makes a playful connection between two invading forces, the horse chestnut tree on the one hand and William the Conqueror and his army on the other, while Ex Nihilo takes with (apparent) grave seriousness Lear’s tale of the foolish old lady who sat in a holly bush, suggesting that this was in fact the ideal situation for transcendental meditation. The knitting-together of different traditions to achieve a sense of wholeness is also a theme of this collection; Kunial plainly loves the Brontës, and Brontë Taxis combines his awareness of living in their country with his Kashmiri background, while Scarborough pays homage to the dying Anne Brontë and Kunial’s mother. The latter appears again at the end of Little Books, about Charlotte Brontë’s making of tiny volumes as a child. The Crucible is a poignant musing on Kunial’s English grandfather Stanley and his eventual rapprochement (on the basis of brown ale and cricket) with his father Abdul after years of estrangement, while Foregrounds expresses empathy with Abdul’s exile, comparing it with that of a four-hundred-year-old bonsai tree.
Kunial’s particular incarnation of unadorned English lyricism is unique and never derivative, even though many domestic and foreign influences are obvious, including Romantic nature poetry and the gentle quizzicality of the Persian mystic Rumi. These two collections are destined to have the same kind of long-term emotional resonance as The Whitsun Weddings. In so intimately evoking the particularities of his own experience and binding together that which was separated, Kunial succeeds in writing poetry of universal relevance that, in the end, speaks to all of Us.--Isabel Taylor
