Boatman! Take These Songs from Me

A tanka is an ancient Japanese form of poetry written in short five-line verses, with a total of 31 syllables. The painted reliefs are an aesthetic creation by Masood Hussain, who bases his artwork in this book on Mirza Ghalib’s couplets on the inevitability of grief. These works explore human suffering, the melancholy of life, and the visceral struggle against oppression..

These themes are contextualized in the poems, written by Gabriel Rosenstock, which speak of love, sacrifice, longing, and freedom. His poems also comprise an interesting orthographical inversion of the capital Y in ‘You’ and the lower case ‘i’, which subjectifies the reading experience through an outward focal lens, reflected in the play of light and hue in the paintings. The bilingual poems in Irish and English capture the essence of the paintings, ferrying the collection across to the reader. This poetically painted coffee table book is a ‘Boatman’ unto itself.