Book Review: Dead Letters: Notes on "Notes on Burials" by Jayant Kashyap

Dead Letters: Notes on "Notes on Burials" by Jayant Kashyap

Winner of the 2024 New Poets Prize

Reviewed by Lucas Mancini

Decent poetry has got to do with death. It’s never about saying something we know for sure. That’d be philosophy, or worse, journalism. If we want our poets to do more than editorialize, there has to be a grasp or reach at the unknown. But the borders on the unknown are closing in. Too much is measurable. Outside is getting smaller. After life sic is one of the last real unknowns. The Big Outside. Not to mention the 3rd rail between 1. never knowing for sure what does come after life and 2. the total certainty that you will outlive at least one of your loved ones. Death gives us, writer and reader, immediate rapport and stakes. No wonder all the pro poets are grieving these days. I say decent poetry is about death, but poets don’t have to mourn. You could get sapphic lyrical and yearn, I guess. You probably cannot get epic, because historically that’s been more about building the facade, and we are pretty firmly in picking up the pieces territory. You might be writing elegies and not even know it. Graveside, taking stock of what’s left, trying to say something impossible. 

Jayant Kashyap’s 2024 New Poets Prize-winning “Notes on Burials” begins with a dig (n.), a definition poem proclaiming “diggings are necessary, just as much as burials are.” In the following poem, “two dead pups in shallow ground” wake up to play with their mother. Digging is necessary because dead things don’t stay dead. Alternate burying, digging, burying in the text mimic processes of linguistic drift, memory, and grieving. One of the most frequently reused devices in “Notes” is the lexical definition, often complete with etymology – not something I tend to appreciate in a poem, but these are notes so it’s earned after all. Kashyap’s forms are usually fragmentary, by way of syntax or the mineral inclusions of dashes and caesuras. Unfortunately, that fragmented form is at its least polished in the titular poem, a reflection of the whole project in miniature. Lists of definitions, expressions of mourning, and mystic imagery, which in Notes on Burials fly out to the divine before firmly planting their feet. I have a similar issue with Pyre, in spite of the more essayistic form and the following epigraph, fittingly (unfittingly) a tweet: “Do birds always fly with purpose or also just for fun[?]” There’s a bit of a rub between the metaphor – wanderlusting bird, soul escaping a funeral pyre – and the ‘observational humor’ introducing it.

Kashyap’s focus zooms in and out. The telescopic effect from personal to cultural to mystical and back oscillates more smoothly, but wider and faster through the middle of the collection. There’s the pseudosphinx devolution of Child, Father where he (dear dad) is “old, and screaming / … / child-like – and now a bird …” or the long bittersweet lines in Earth, Fire (i.m. Grandma) as children wish they’d listened to her stories when they had the chance. An ecopoem, Witness, in which birds reappear only to die mysteriously, features another reversal; not from father to child, but from innocence to the simple “habit” of cruelty. “Imagine the earth as a spider – / a little boy plucks one of its legs from its body …” Immediately following are the elements of history, playing cruelty out, tracing words and names to an extensional definition of mutual and habitual inhumanity. Zooming nearer and further: lost love in London, then another peak of fragmented expression after [t]he pastor said the graveyard has now sprouted flowers like a welcome. Various burials and varied relations to all sorts of loss. 

These culminate in On the finding of a body, said to be the result of a drug overdose. See the hedging in the title. “It won’t make news / because events like this scar names.” This body could have belonged to a family member. Based on the speaker’s insight, this was at least a family friend, or maybe a “friend’s friend” as Notes on Burials has it. Beyond raging at the loss, there’s rage “that we want / to know nothing” that could damage living reputations, rage at whoever blames “bad company” before letting this person’s memory slip through the cracks. It’s practically spat: “Another body will occupy the earth’s drying / dying belly.” Maybe senescence is necessary. We may have to die – someday – we may have to learn not to rage against that. “Somewhere some- / thing … burnt” in the core or at the edges of life that we’re forced to imitate. But roughly nothing is more unnecessary than an overdose. A series of concentric failures stretching to the edge of the world. Whoever says they’re not complicit is where to point your rage.

That’s the deepest Kashyap goes into the negativity of loss, the real emotional traps of avoidance and absence. In the last four poems, he lays out a few escape routes in varying registers of reality. At the top I said death is one of the last known unknowns. Directly parallel to death is one of the last unknown unknowns and a further source of decent poetry, the dream. We still don’t know exactly how or why we dream. That fact branches out to all sorts of other mysteries. Things we don’t know we don’t know. Faces. Places. You get it. I’m sure you’ve died in a dream. A jump or fall, car accident, plane crash. You know. I’m sure that feels nothing like dying. Nobody can really say. Scrap of hope – maybe death follows dream logic. It could be passing from room to room to room without knowing how you got where you’re going. It could feel like waking up in one piece. 

Call that the positivity of loss. Kashyap does not indulge in survivor’s guilt. On the other side of overdose’s rage, he tells us to be more than “people / throwing words at each-other / where the body was found.” Words are for the living, for memory’s and good grief’s sake. For the body’s sake there are rituals. Some of the most evocative passages in the closing poems detail the dispersal of ashes in moving water, dispersal beyond that too, and later the preparation of the afterlife’s body through offerings of pind after pind – “‘may this create a head’ – ‘may this – neck and shoulders’ – ‘may this …’” Ritual is a visceral counterweight to the philology of Carrying, a balance which leans more toward the abstract in Notes on Burials. I’m blaming the text but this could easily be reader error. Cultural competence could be why “Notes on Burials” worked for me where its titular poem didn’t. It took me a while to realize the title is partly misdirection – Kashyap and his losses “have not much to do with graves –” says Carrying – a soul coaxed out of the body through cremation recurs – “‘without looking’ at it …” says Incarnation, paraphrasing Earth, Fire. Birds recur starting from the first poem, later in Pyre as a metaphor for the soul, and finally in Dream Sequence, making eye contact, “tasked with carrying souls / – unto heaven.” If “Notes on Burials” is to be trusted, there are a comforting number of ways to make it to the afterlife (>1), and even more numerous ways to keep living in spite of loss. Really and surreally numerous. 

This could be my ignorance talking, but I read some measure of both tradition and invention into Kashyap’s rituals. That’s not to say he invented the funeral pyre or votive Incarnation. Those are real – reified? – traditional anyway, but Kashyap is a poet, so his relation to tradition (reality?) isn’t fully on its terms. No Eliot necessary. Poems are all-original rituals regardless of the traditions they draw on. They help the poet keep something alive, some sense beyond themselves; or else they revive a past self, this perished other, that latent future decomposing in a reader. We hope this is more than tossing words around. Aimed at posterity and futurity both. Survival depends on more than originality. What survives is partly timeless, but the better part of timelessness is dying, or a dream. Kashyap closes with Prayer for My Mother as a Child, space and time out of sync at a vanishing point: “myself … a quiet emptiness in her school bag, / … / … I’ll talk to her / years ago without her knowing. I’ll go with her to places / in her dreams …” At their best, that’s what dead letters are for: trying to live forever with the ones we love. Trying to say something impossible, anyway.

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Lucas Mancini will say something nice at your funeral free of charge and edits poetry at Eulogy Press. See more at BRUISER, Burial Magazine, Some Words, and elsewhere.