Mahmud
Friend, neighbour, fellow poet. We both
lived close to Pitshanger Lane, a village-like area of Ealing, West London,
quiet save for the Heathrow flightpath noise pollution. People tend to move
here when they have small children due to the quality of the local parks and
schools, and then they often stay on after their children have grown up. I
first met him before I knew him: 15 years ago, in my 40s, I suddenly decided I
needed to get fit. Fatherhood and a desk job had wrapped me into a body I did not
want to have. One of my regimes involved exercising in Pitshanger Park by
jumping on and off a stone bench. A well dressed man in his 70s with a walking
stick and a camera stopped to watch me, and as he passed, said I wish I could
do that. I was to learn this was typical
of the interactions he had with the people around him. A kind word usually, but
also ready to challenge any behaviour he felt was illogical or flawed.
A year or two later I was browsing the
poetry section of Pitshanger Library. I
was struck by how many books in the poetry section were by the same author,
unusual since the only other writers were Hughes, Plath, and recent laureates.
I started reading them, and was struck by the unusual (for British poetry)
themes of the poem: metaphysical, spiritual, taking time to unfold, written
clearly with a knowledge of poets such as Blake and Wordsworth, but with also a
broad knowledge of texts from other traditions. The books were all published by
Rockingham, a small UK press, so I contacted the editor, suspecting Mahmud must
be a local.
Within a couple of days I was sitting with
him in Café 786 on Pitshanger Lane, and here started our regular meetings. He
was a conversationalist of the kind that I had read about but seldom
encountered before: a Coleridgean breadth and breeziness, flitting easily
between the big ideas (religion, death, politics) to some local and evanescent
detail from the street outside. Within a few days I was his ‘son in poetry’,
and he soon linked me to Joanne, his daughter in poetry. I looked forward to our meetings and always
wished that they were longer.
Over the years we met regularly, but
looking back, not as regularly as either of us would have liked. I had a
family, a job, a commute, he had a sick wife and was notably weakening over the
years. He replaced his walking stick with a Zimmer frame. One of the pleasures
of cycling and walking in the Ealing area was the chance of seeing him and
having a chat. On one occasion he told me that he thought Jesus had not
suffered enough. I asked why, and he replied that a few days on the cross were
nothing on the pains and indignity of old age. Increasingly if I saw him outside, he would be
going to a hospital appointment or medical check-up.
Once the lockdown came, in spring 2020, despite
living a few streets away, I could not see him. However, we phoned and emailed,
and he told me that he wanted to publish his next and final book, The editor of
Rockingham had retired, and he needed help in finding a new publisher and
getting the book into print. I sent the manuscript around and rapidly received
a positive response from the editor of Knives, Forks and Spoons. There followed
a busy period of three-way editing and messages as we formatted and changed the
manuscript to fit the requirements of book publishing. By this time, in the
summer, Mahmud had suffered the terrible loss of his wife, Pari, from Covid,
and he was himself no longer fit enough to proofread.
The book The Journey came out
towards the end of the year, with one of his own photos on the cover. I wish I
could have sat with him and looked through it together, perhaps reading out
some of the poems. A few days after he
received it, he told me he was unhappy about one of the words in the author
description. It was not his latest book, he said, it was his last book.
Now that he has gone, his book remains, a
monument to his sensitivities and perceptions as one of the few poets in
Britain who followed in Blake’s shows, who demonstrated not just as an idea,
but as an active being, that all deities reside in the human breast.
No comments:
Post a Comment