By Berkley Wendell Semple

A POEM can dignify even the crudest thing—redeeming it from anonymity or disgrace, and elevating it to something strange, memorable, and profound. This transformative alchemy is often at work in the poetry of Sasenarine Persaud, the prolific and perceptive Guyanese-Canadian-America n poet. Persaud’s vision is panoramic; whatever crosses his retina often finds its way into verse.

Think of his poems as a drag seine: they trawl through oceans, seas, and rivers—and what they haul in is wild, diverse, and often surprising. The metaphorical net catches everything, including, as the old saying goes, the kitchen sink.

This democratic inclusivity of content—where even the trivial or overlooked becomes central—is also found in the works of literary giants like Walt Whitman and Kamau Brathwaite. In such poets, the seemingly insignificant is not mere scaffolding but structure—the very fabric of the poem itself. These “kitchen sink” poems brim with so much that there’s something in them to please, challenge, or provoke every reader.

One of Persaud’s most striking poetic modes is the travelogue. These poems feature a wandering, curious persona who observes, reflects, and philosophises—often simultaneously. The poems ebb like tides, carrying the poet’s thoughts as they brush against, cling to, and interrogate the world around them.

Take Patches, the opening poem in Persaud’s new collection A Scent of India (MaWenzi House, $20.95). The poem juxtaposes two spaces: poverty as want and wealth as waste. In the latter, we find “McMansions” with “bedrooms for guests who never come”—symbols of excess and hollow affluence. The former is one of patched clothing and scarcity—going without even a buckta (Guyanese Creole for male underwear). Clothing is cobbled together from remnants, from the patches of what once was whole.

This contrast is stark, and Persaud handles it with a deft touch, connecting material realities with quiet emotional resonance. The movement of thought in the poem is subtle, like a marble rolling along an uneven floor—never still, always suggestive.

Wearing khaki shorts without buckta
The firm rub of hard cotton
Handstitched from inseam, indigo
Denim scraps gathered from a worn
Shirt’s least jaded areas—what
Do you mean thimbles from Hollywood
Or Pinewood—just having needle
And thread enough—we asked for little

You who would scorn our memories
Mistaking blog’s history for nostalgia
Celebrating our cloud in computing
Cryptocurrencies, wallow in ancient
Bigbellied Buddhas better Ganesh’s
Sisters see blue patches from a distance
On our separate bridges than our bottoms

Bare skin, unshod toes navigating
Pebbles on unpaved Dennis Street—we
Will rename that too, slaveholder,
Amerindian landgrabber, misogynist,
Ant-trampler, carnivore, meateater,
Orsomethingnowoffensivedoer—to
Rangilia’s store for jil-bread to Kitty

There is a poetic quality in Persaud’s work that echoes John Ashbery—particularly in the way his poems meander away from a central idea, exploring tangents before circling back, much like a jazz solo that improvises before returning to the melody. In Patches, these digressions are often allusive, drawing on references to Indian mythological figures that lend the poem layers of meaning and cultural resonance. Ultimately, however, the poem returns to the literal—to the unambiguous terrain of lived experience.

The title A Scent of India hints at more than it states. The collection isn’t explicitly or solely about India. Instead, India becomes a kind of atmospheric presence—a way of seeing, sensing, and remembering. It permeates the poems not only through history and culture but through the legacy of its exports: people, food, language, religion, art, and politics.

India, in Persaud’s poetry, is not geographically bound. It lives in Guyana, the poet’s birthplace, where its influence is unmistakable. It persists in Canada and the United States, where Persaud has lived for decades. In this sense, the collection’s title is both literal and metaphorical. The “scent” is everywhere: sometimes pungent, sometimes faint, but always present.

Even in a poem about the Holocaust—specifically Auschwitz—this transnational and transhistorical consciousness is present. In one devastating passage, the cataloguing of human remains evokes the industrial scale of brutality:

110,000 shoes / 3,800 suitcases,
470 prostheses, 88-pound eyeglasses,
500 acres, 155 buildings, 300 ruins.

This chilling arithmetic is not limited to the Holocaust. The poem extends the litany of suffering to include Russia in WWII, the Hindu-Muslim conflicts in India, China during Mao’s Long March, the Rwandan genocide, and the systematic destruction of Native peoples in the Americas. A single poetic thread here unravels a global tapestry of shared, recurrent violence.

Most of the poems in A Scent of India are short—between eight and eighteen lines. Many resemble extended sonnets in scope and density, though they forgo rhyme. They are enigmatic, elusive, and often epigrammatic—evoking feeling more than asserting meaning. The poems have the lapidary quality of finely cut gems. Poems like Empty House, Cleaning Up After, and Into October achieve a mysterious resonance. The ideas are clear but slippery, familiar yet resistant to easy interpretation.

There is a kind of poetic matati—a wringing-out process—at work here. Superfluity is purged. These are taut, compressed poems, eschewing conventional punctuation. There are no question marks, no periods—no terminal points. The poems resist closure; they linger beyond the page, echoing in the reader’s mind.

This technique compresses meaning, deepens density, and demands rereading. The effect is akin to navigating a poetic labyrinth: the reward for persistence is insight. In this, Persaud’s collection echoes Wilson Harris’s Eternity to Season, both in form and in philosophical ambition.

In my review of Persaud’s earlier work, Mattress Makers, I noted the intrepidity of the narrators. That spirit continues here. The peripatetic voices in A Scent of India move constantly—like satellites, ever orbiting, ever recording. The locations are global:

• Picking mangoes and walking the streets of Kitty, Guyana
• Buying Indian street food in Couva, Trinidad
• Strolling beaches in San Salvador
• Wintering in Florida, missing the May/June rains of Guyana
• Observing the ruins of a concentration camp in Europe

The best poems in the collection evoke a deeply felt sense of place, refracted through the prism of India. In Doubles at Curepe Junction, Indian Belles at Sevilla House, Couva, and Rooster in Trinidad, we experience the India of Trinidad—its cultural residue made palpable:

Hands outstretched, supplicant at night
for Indian manna in grease-proof paper
Hot channa curry on thin puris
Cupped in palm and medium hot

And again:

Nothing curried channa and leaf-thin puris
At Curepe Junction won’t cure. But whose hands
Stirred that karahi, whose palms guided belna
Whose eyes aflame misused orifice, muscles

This is not nostalgia. It is invocation—of culture as lived, of history as embodied, of identity as hybrid and ongoing. The karahi and belna are not just kitchen implements—they are cultural relics. The raggas hummed while cooking become part of the poem’s ambient music.

A Scent of India is more than a fleeting perfume. It is history, mythology, food, and philosophy. It is the taste of masala—complex, layered, unforgettable. Whether you’re in Puerto Rico, Guyana, the United States, or elsewhere, Persaud’s poetry reminds us that the scent of India lingers—imprinted on the world and within us.

This collection is expansive, ambitious, and richly rewarding. It invites the reader not merely to observe but to engage—to taste, smell, and feel. In doing so, it dignifies the everyday, making it strange, new, and necessary.