As is evidenced in his earlier books of poems, the poetry of Debashish Lahiri has consciously endeavored to bring together cultural traditions, historical monuments, art galleries and archives, not just from India, his place of origin, but from the entire world. Lahiri’s poetry spans the archives and the arcane to their presence in the present, reclaiming the significance of forgotten relics that assert their relevance in the second millennium. Increasingly in his books of poems that have been published to date, one cannot fail but notice the voice of the scholar-poet for whom the world is home.

In his recently published book of poems, Legion of Lost Letters, subtitled Dramatic Monologues of Romans in Exile, Lahiri’s initiatory poem, ‘Ovid Contemplates Writing his Fasti at Tomis’ is a direct reference to poet Ovid’s exile to Tomis, having earned the wrath of Emperor Augustus, as he exposed the covert immorality in the emperor’s own household, despite the emperor presenting himself as a stern advocate of morality and ethics. According to experts, Ovid could not complete his intended 12-part poem, Fasti, during his period of exile at Tomis. Just 6 parts of Fasti, which deal with each calendar month of a year, seem to have either survived, or Ovid could have left the long poem incomplete. The anguish and lament of the exiled poet resonate in Lahiri’s lines, ‘My memories of Rome not near enough/for verse.’ / Caesar, the poet’s gold/is the pestilent dew in my ribs/My spittoon glows in the dark.

The narrative poem ‘Sycamore Gap’ recreates youthful love and passion between the beautiful Celt Aella and the Roman soldier Quintus Flammius, their love facilitated by the gap in Hadrian’s wall. The despotic Celtic male parent’s barbarism is described vividly, as he ruthlessly murders his daughter Aella for falling in love with a Roman. Lahiri’s volume of 64 pages includes 12 narrative poems, most of them quite long. The poet defines these poems as dramatic monologues. A standard definition of a dramatic monologue states that it is “a poem written in the form of a speech of an individual character; it compresses into a single vivid scene a narrative sense of the speaker’s history and psychological insight into his character.”

In his introduction, Lahiri explains that while visiting the UK, he was deeply moved by the relics of Roman Britain, which stirred his imagination, and his time travel resulted in the creation of these poems of a forgotten past. He states, “Moving through the puckered stone of Roman ruins in the present, the poet unearths rumpled vestments of the human heart buried there, making the ruins revenant.”. Referring to the ordinary folks outside the elitist aristocracy, such as men, women, lovers, dreamers, and aesthetes, among others, the poet adds, “These forgotten beings from beyond the millennial horizon ponder the second millennium. The light of these lives, effigies of breathing, made pale and frail by time, resonate in Legion of Lost Letters: a light that is not yet loud enough to be heard.”. Meticulously the poet has inserted a date for each of his poems. This historical data and the historiographic recreation are the unique features of these poems that blend time and the timeless through re-memorializing processes.

In the poem At Deva, the fortress at Chester, evidence of human migration and cultural transfer echoes in the rediscovery and renewal of the past, ‘time and geography, compass and cutlass’ … Roman-Parthian-Indian: an impossible survival, like a story that thrives in a crevice of history’, along with the Hindu gods Pavana and Maruta. The poem, ‘The Epistle of Martinus Hostilius,’ is a touching poem of love and longing for a home far away where the wife and daughter live. The poet’s postscript to the epistle suggests a dramatic immediacy despite the languorous romantic mood of the poem. There is occasional tongue-in-cheek humour and irony too in these rare and refreshing poems, as when the shopkeepers at Caerleon smile at the tourist-poet, ‘smiled at a tourist/reeling from relics:’

Lahiri’s “dramatic monologues” are often reflective, pensive, and philosophic, though his adroit use of images, metaphors, and similes invests the storytelling with a depth of rumination, sometimes abstract, sometimes subjective, as in A Prayer for Nemesis, where the poet’s introspective search is arrested in this query whose answer is interiorized: ‘Dear Nemesis, what is the calculus of change required to find what is lost in the sand, if what is lost is yourself…?’. The Colchester Sphinx is once again a monologue of unrequited love, an inexplicable longing for ‘a question in stone/when there was no stone to carve’ for the Sphinx, ‘darker than both day and night/a face without light or shadow,’ challenging the imagistic outline of a subtle chiaroscuro. The Cupid of Fishbourne is a monologue that juxtaposes a duality in terms of recreating one’s identity as a young man, in the first person, ‘I was Rufinius the beautiful,’ refracted into a strange deformity with the consciousness of being still young, ‘I am still twenty-five’ and yet old/in my despair.’.

The informed poet himself introduces himself as a wondering, wandering tourist with a well-curated itinerary that opens the windows of perception and re-visions of Roman Britain in the poem, ‘Walking with the Romans.’ The poet notices that in Colchester, City Centre, a family from Coimbatore tries on Roman togas, and the Welsh guide impersonates a Roman slave. Two other poems that conclude this fascinating foray into the archaeological signposts that script the presence of Roman Britain in twenty-first-century multicultural Britain are Wayside Notes: Peddar’s Way and York Upended. These poems are the poet’s responses to the unravelling of Roman Britain to those travellers who are keen to explore beyond the tourist guidebooks. After all, it is to be remembered that ‘the Romans occupied Britain for about 370 years, from AD 43 to 410. This period was marked by frequent change, with more than 80 emperors ruling over Britain during this time. The Romans introduced many changes to Britain, including towns, roads, military garrisons, taxation, and a centralized government. These changes have left a rich archaeological legacy, including villas, towns, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall. The Romans first invaded Britain in 55 and 54 BC as part of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars’. Christianity and the use of the classical language Latin were two other momentous contributions of the Roman administration of Britain.

Unfurling a chapter of often forgotten early British history, Debasish Lahiri’s Legion of Lost Letters: Dramatic Monologues of Romans in Exile emerges as a fascinating cultural travelogue in poetic format, aesthetically crafted with nuanced use of images and wordplay. The poet’s role as a travel guide and his immersion into the lives, loves, and duties of the Romans in Britain recreate for the readers a chapter of the early history of Britain when the ordinary people of Rome were subjected to exile and forced migration from their native land, most often coerced to make a home away from home.

Undoubtedly, readers of Anglophone poetry, as well as students and researchers of western political and social history and cultural anthropology, will find in Debasish Lahiri’s Legion of Lost Letters Dramatic Monologues of Romans in Exile a rich learning experience.

The reviewer is former dean, faculty of Arts, University of Calcutta

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Legion of Lost Letters: Dramatic Monologues of Romans in Exile

By Debashish Lahiri

London: The Black Spring Press Group, 2023

66 pages