Luck is the Hook

By Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books.

Luck Is the Hook is her sixth book from Bloodaxe. In these poems, chance plays a part in finding or losing people and places that are loved: a change in the weather, a trick of language, a bomb that misses its mark, six pomegranate seeds eaten by mistake; all these events cast long shadows and raise questions about who is recording them, about believing, not believing, wanting to believe.

A knot undone at Loch Lomond snags over Glasgow, a seal swims in the Clyde, a ghost stalks her quarry at a stepped well, an elephant and a cathedral come face to face on the frozen Thames, a return ticket is thrown into the tide of Humber, strangers wash in. Even in an uncertain world, love tangles with luck, flights show up on the radar and technology keeps track of desire.

Imtiaz Dharker was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2014 for Over the Moon and for her services to poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780372198

Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. She is an accomplished artist and documentary film-maker, and has published six books with Bloodaxe, Postcards from god (including Purdah) (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001), The terrorist at my table (2006), Leaving Fingerprints (2009), Over the Moon (2014), and Luck Is the Hook (2018). All her poetry collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of the books; she is one of very few poet-artists to work in this way. She was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2014, presented to her by The Queen in spring 2015, and has also received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Over the Moon was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2014. Her poems are on the British GCSE and A Level English syllabus, and she reads with other poets at Poetry Live! events all over the country to more than 25,000 students a year. She has had a dozen solo exhibitions of drawings in India, London, Leeds, New York and Hong Kong. She scripts and directs films, many of them for non-government organisations in India, working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children. In 2015 she appeared on the iconic BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs.

Book preview

IMTIAZ DHARKER

LUCK IS THE HOOK

Imtiaz Dharker grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2014. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings which form an integral part of her books.

Luck Is the Hook is her sixth book from Bloodaxe. In these poems, chance plays a part in finding or losing people and places that are loved: a change in the weather, a trick of language, a bomb that misses its mark, six pomegranate seeds eaten by mistake; all these events cast long shadows and raise questions about who is recording them, about believing, not believing, wanting to believe.

A knot undone at Loch Lomond snags over Glasgow, a seal swims in the Clyde, a ghost stalks her quarry at a stepped well, an elephant and a cathedral come face to face on the frozen Thames, a return ticket is thrown into the tide of Humber, strangers wash in. Even in an uncertain world, love tangles with luck, flights show up on the radar and technology keeps track of desire.

‘A celebratory, humane, wholly utterable, subtly crafted poetry. Its dark jewels are the magnificent poems of bereavement, which will surely endure. Reading her, one feels that were there to be a World Laureate, Imtiaz Dharker would be the only candidate.’ – Carol Ann Duffy on Over the Moon

Cover drawing by Imtiaz Dharker

IMTIAZ DHARKER

Luck is the Hook

for Ava, Luca, Sofia

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Chaudhri Sher Mobarik looks at the loch

The Knot

Stitch

Snag

Fankle

Always, snow

Kissing strangers

Thaw

To have all this

Vespare

Seal, River Clyde

Letters to Glasgow

Bairn

Long

Arc

Made, Unmade

A Haunting

Six pomegranate seeds

Underground

The Letter

Sixty seconds

Sticks

Beak

Fix

Six rings

Rings

A haunting of words

Flight

Hell-raiser

Haunted

Warning

The trick

Lapis Lazuli

The Elephant is walking on the River Thames

Hide

First sight, through falling snow

Fair

Night vision

Mr Wisdom Looks for China by the Thames

Larks

Heavenly Emporium

If you are looking for Wisdom

m) Those that have just broken the vase

Cherub, St Paul’s

Checkout

Flight Radar

Unexploded

Exploded

Channel of vision

Brutal

The Elephants are on the Piccadilly Line

The Fabrick

Ringing the changes

The sound of your name

Bloom

Close to the sun

Wolf, Words

What will you tell the children?

Out of line

Gurh and ghee

The Jump

Send this

This line, that thread

The garden gnomes are on their mobile phones

Drain

Double

3 a.m., the radio on

Estuary

This Tide of Humber

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling