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Blue note not quite heaven

It's a pity that more of our budding writers don't go into exile. From distant lands, our island-nation takes on a patina that could dazzle the most jaded eye. The "sky runs free", "the earth, the moon, and the stars" are "part of a [poet's] house", and the trees are "perfect". At least according to the author, who has been in a pseudo self-imposed exile these past half-decade or so 'in another country'. And the nostalgia for his homeland is tangible, although whether such a paradise of "jade green paddy fields" and "lithe palms" exists is problematic.

When writing about the country of adoption (or is that adaptation?), however, Aziz is more realistic; or at least it is comforting to think so, contrasting colder northern climes with our sun-blessed isle: "I hate this ash grey town," he says (of Chelsea), "crumbling around me”. He yearns for a place in a postcard from home, where buildings are "bathed in tropical sun" and the skies "reign a kingdom bounded only by horizons". Of his present abode ("yellow halogen lights sickly cast their glow on the street") he laments: "this is not my home"; ergo, the undeniable urge to return to "where I am someone, not a nobody".

The landscape in this 'Meditation in Chelsea' is redolent of a wasteland, and it is a place where our poet has "changed islands, and assumed my new secret identity". Is it that of a latter day T. S. Eliot, one wonders; especially as Aziz writes of a "light switch that will flicker this morning into being". He lays a trail of words through four short portraits of emotional landscapes that are titled, perhaps somewhat self-consciously, Quartets: 'Colombo', 'Kandy', 'Galle' and 'Nuwara Eliya'. Again, shades of perhaps arguably 'the 20th Century's most influential poet'. (There's even a Prufrockian line: "I will always desire my mouth dry"!) But Aziz's theme is not the death of western civilisation; it is "...now is the time to live", an affirmation that is repeated in three of the 'quartets'.

Symbols and images crop up severally in the emotional recollections of what appears a tranquil existence: Aziz's memory palace of the paradise he yearns for resonates with heat lightning (a recurrent motif), the fear of falling fans (Freud would have known what this meant), heat "wrapped around me like an old lover", sweat, sad-sweet moments of intimacy and a litany of sounds from Buddhist chants to temple bells that "break the silence of the night".

Aziz's word-reproductions of what the senses once recorded are always to transpose the mundane reality of our everyday into his lost, missed yesterdays. (And yet he writes for a universal audience, too: anyone longing to return to a country in the imagination).

In '1983', though, he flashes back to those black days in July when "the mobs shall run / the fires will burn / the innocent will stand helpless / nowhere to turn ... the sirens will wail / long into the night / while I listen to their sounds / wide-eyed and awake". Aziz was probably all of ten years old when the ethnic riots turned his neighbourhood into a mini-pogrom, and no one who reads his 'recollection' "on a hot July night" can accuse him of filtering tranquillity in. It's the deep emotion of one old enough to know, and too young to understand.

But it's not all heavy imagism and pregnant symbolism that Aziz offers. There are some light, witty pieces that dot this 'sophomoric effort' [author's description of his first work]: in a magic-realistic 'When Neruda Dreams', "fish fly to the moon and sing Clair de Lune in their best singing voices"; in the 'Earthworm Tango' funeral "pious men praise you to the skies with their honest lies"; clothes are "a memory of a space I occupied"; desire is "when the walls are eggshell thin, paper barriers against the inferno", desire is "cold and calculating, bringing the spy of lust into your voyeur heart", that's desire ("so bad you can taste it").

And Aziz is at his best when he writes about music, especially jazz, a subject he evidently knows a little of and loves a lot (not to put too fine a point on it).

In the marvellous 'Miles Away', he notes the music "sound high up to the heavens - like butterflies hovering around the wings of a sail, curved in the breeze' (but even "when Miles plays ... air turns to gold and the wind sings along, the memory of home..."). Emotional, these exiles. Then, in the clever 'Charlie Parker Knows', ("let there be light, let there be sound"), "the bass player, lean and tall, watches his fingers carefully plucking the heartstrings of the double bass, ripping the low notes from the wood / the stage lights are hot, sweat making his fingers slip; time to call it a night, don't want to anger the jazz gods by flaunting their gift / a final flourish, then back to the chorus; a sprinkle of applause: don't care, amen!, hallelujah! seen the blue note heaven, baby..." But Aziz is at his most virtuostic in the onomatopoetic 'Ella Sings': "bibadubop, zibabapumnuanzair..." - but no, you've got to read it yourself (preferably aloud!).

Now be warned. If you do invest in this slim volume, there are bound to be entire poems that you may be tempted to skip; not so much because they are shallow as they are too deeply personal.

The section 'Secret Gardens', for instance is a smorgasbord of "tropical kisses" and "mad sweet things - lies, half-truths, confessions". But whether you are intrigued by the shocking tranquillity of 'China Bay' or repelled by the tasteless flippancy of 'Patriot', there's bound to be nuggets of emotions, ideas, and recollections that will stick in your short-term memory like blue note heaven. For Afdhel Aziz is something of a wordsmith, even though he is not quite a poet yet (and one suspects would make a better musician). And for that, it's worth an hour or two on a hot, sweaty, Sunday afternoon with heat lightning as counterpoint.