Light in Darkness: poems and photos

Book reviewBy Alan

Keywords: New publications, Books, Poetry, Photography and Komali MeDi Clown Academy

Cover - Light in Darkness

Hamish Boyd’s poetry is by turns witty, enigmatic, profound, joyful, funny, anguished, angry and moving, mirroring, perhaps, the many elements of his nature. Many of the poems in this collection are sensitive evocations of the natural world but often they are jumping-off points for deeper enquiries about the nature of the self and of reality. The connecting motif, however, as the title suggests, is Hamish’s exploration of light and darkness, both of the world and of himself.

Sometimes the dark predominates – as in a poem about a caged tiger or in the anger that surges through ‘Fashion Slaves’, a poem about cows that will be slaughtered for the fashion industry:

But we do not smell like Coco Chanel,

More like the sweat stench of fear,

The death reeking blood of the abattoir.

Sometimes the darkness and the light are tightly interlaced. But, more often, the light finally surges through. Sometimes it is the reappearance of the sun:

Yet my heart floods for all things that become then expire:

The forest, the mountains, the snow that melts,

The deer that run when they hear my footstep,

The carcass rotting on the ground not far from where I stand.

I look up and even cry for the sky

Then the wind abates, and with it gone,

Sun’s smile flushes full warm on my face,

And I laugh like a madman, arms thrown wide in delight.

Sometimes, the saviour is a loved one

I have crawled in many caves alone and that has been the end of me.

But you have always reappeared to pull me out screaming and kicking to remember what fresh air I like.

Sometimes, as in ‘Losar Fire’, it is an elemental, mystic cleansing

Cleansing by fire.

Absolution of hindrance.

No more delay for full dawning.

In fact, the prevailing tone of this collection is celebratory, climaxing in the final poem in the collection,

‘Yes’

Yes is a powerful utterance.

It melts ice and hearts.

It blossoms butterflies.

Flowers flowers,

streams streams

and suns suns.

Hamish’s love of language, his glittering facility with words, is intoxicating, although now and again he overdoes it (of a mountain, “shivering its own epidermal bliss”) or he falls into the prosaic (“But policing won’t work with men and women”).

He is, among other things, an actor and a medical clown, and some of this poetry seems written to be read aloud, even acted, which is precisely what he did one evening in a riveting multi-media show in the Tibetan Pavilion. But it is the simpler, quieter poems, those that call for an envelope of silence, which are often the more resonant. Poems like ‘Source of Light’.

Light?

Flight?

Wing bright pool of rest?

What need now for

Refuge,

Yidam,

Unbound expansiveness?

I sit here on the floor.

This plenum void.

Hamish’s photographs are a wonderful accompaniment and augmentation of the poems in this handsome collection.


‘Light in Darkness’, published by Komali MeDi Clown Academy, 2016. All proceeds from this book will go to the Academy to train and support medical clowns to work in rural and urban India. For more information contact hamish@auroville.org.in.