Rishi Dastidar has always been an accessible and entertaining poet, with asides in satire and political comment. Since his last book, however, he seems to have been taking lessons in lyricism and romanticism, perhaps from the likes of Brian Patten: because the opening poem ‘Whiteboard’ is nothing if not Pattenesque. It plays with the idea of transience and starting over, beginning and ending with the same two lines:
I wrote a poem on a whiteboard
so I could wipe it away, begin again.
In the four lines between the repeat the poem asks ‘Who needs their words permanently stored / when you can write a poem on a whiteboard’, which basically reframes the two line repeat and tells the reader that:
Transience should be what we applaud;
fixed words – fixed ideas – are a pain.
Are they? Isn’t this very poem fixed upon the page, at the start of a 75 page book where every poem is intransient? Am I missing the joke or at least a punchline? Is it just me that thinks trying to write a transient poem that is not fixed or final might be far more interesting than this squib of a poem?
Actually, I am a fan of Patten’s poetry (possibly because one of the first poetry books I bought was one of his), especially his love poems, although they can sometimes veer uncomfortably close to naive hippy idolatry. There are plenty of love poems in Dastidar’s book too, with rather a lot of ‘transcendence’, magic’, kisses and desire. It’s all a bit vague, non-specific and trite, adolescent even: passionate and well meant, possibly even ‘true’ if by that you mean felt and/or experiences, but they are the sorts of poems I used to tell my creative writing students to discard.
In a similar manner, the A-Z games of ‘Credentialism’, which is basically an alphabetical list poem moving towards a melancholic punchline reads like a workshop exercise and nothing more. Better are the reimagining of ‘Charon the bus driver’, who watches Friday night couplings and encounters whilst singing, and the more serious ‘On board the “Tynesider”‘ which finds Martin Luther King on the train to Newcastle to accept an honorary doctorate there. Dastidar suggests that King ‘was at his best / when he was harried, harassed’ and the poem concludes with him
on a slow train to somewhere
he would never go again, minting
coin as easily as he breathed, currency
we still spend in the realm of hope.
This is moving and original, and in stark contrast to the overstated and overwrought ‘Ah the sweet breath of creation! swoon the hemispheres in unison’ which occurs in ‘Salon de creation’, a prose poem where ‘Left brain is giddy with excitement at this world, synapses being shown a whole new social whirl, while right brain is simultaneously smug and serene’. If Dastidar is set upon satirising the notion of creative salon then I want it to cut to the bone, savaged, not reliant upon the rather tame and repeated idea that ‘intellectual coups […] will be repudiated at precisely 7.27 the next morning’ and ‘may our metaphor for making never be exhausted, or at least until the sun comes up’.
And, actually, ‘may our metaphor for making never be exhausted’ seems like quite an admirable ambition, especially when presented with such a tired and unambitious book of poems such as this. I wish Dastidar had taken note of himself in ‘Melted cockerel’:
Feeling alive isn’t the sin you
think it is, but believing it trumps all is.
Rupert Loydell 13th March 2026
