SASENARINE Persaud has always been a titillating writer. The author of over 15 books of fiction and poetry, his vast oeuvre is defined by the old poetic axiom, “make it new.” His poetry achieves a height of surprise through deft turns of phrase, evocative imagery, and layered representation of ideas. He is the coiner of the term “Yogic Realism”, which—as his poetic output suggests—engages deeply with Hindu religion and mythology, lending added resonance to his work. It accounts for his poetry’s philosophical, mythological bent, which can be densely allusive. This is certainly true in his incantatory piece, “Waiting for Yamraj,” a threnody of sorts from his new collection, Mattress Makers (Mawenzi House, $20.95), which was awarded a Guyana Prize in 2022. As in some of his best works (In a Boston Night and Monsoon on the Fingers of God come to mind), the new collection has a wonderful compression of form and language, squeezing expected grammar right out of the poems.

There are no periods at the end of many poems in Mattress Makers. This omission suggests a continuation of themes from one poem to the next. There is an almost granular way of seeing in the poems, all of which demand that you look closer, reread and re-evaluate.

What is the collection about? It seems to be about everything—the salient and the mundane. Take “Four Miles in Flatwoods Park,” for example, where a simple drive opens literal floodgates of things to forget, which the poem remembers. It is a remarkable illustration of how the mind latches on to things, capturing the small and the large as it passes through:

We will forget the job cuts, the new database
A hawk gliding to a limb without flapping
Chirping wrens bobbing up from grass
Freshcut in summerlike winter afternoons

The machine’s metal tracks a tank’s
Imprinted in the damp slope the cleared bottom
At the foot of trees mulched stumps, hundred
Feet oaks and pines sawdust—remember Katrina
Every beauty every named demonised in a storm
The levees around New Orleans breached
Because roots penetrate dams—flood water
Widening cracks into floodgates will not occur…

The poems take in everything and everywhere; they move, skipping across continents and countries. A certain intrepid spirit informs the place and setting of the poems as they move through Persaud’s native Guyana, the US, England, India, Trinidad, Canada, Rome, and more.

The poems about Guyana come in for keen assessment, especially the landscape with its beautiful patina of sky and surroundings. The following, from “Canal No. 2 Polder”, is striking:

For evenings on Savis Dam for sunsets
on tall grass for savannahs inundated
vermillion and turmeric liquid
after the rains listening not with ears
or eyes or hearts even on monitors
for all we were will never be and are

Persaud writes beautifully about Guyana, always with a subtle sort of intimacy and truth—whether he is exploring the Jonestown cult disaster or the city of Georgetown. But then he writes well of every other place, too.

Mattress Makers is a book of voyages. A fitting subtitle might be “Around the World in Approximately One Hundred and Three Poems.” Its ambitious sweep and subtle variation of subject matter can be dizzying.

Part of this collection’s pleasure is its panorama and inclusivity. The remarkable poem “Waterloo: At Siewdass Sadhu’s Temple in the Sea” exemplifies this scope, moving through events, placing experiences, religions, and philosophies side by side, highlighting poignant moments in a single life.

Then there are poems so intimate they trap an emotion in form, caging it for deeper analysis—see “This Shore” and “Shadows on our Skins.”

Some of the shorter poems (some fewer than 15 lines) achieve the clarity of epigrams. “Late Tea” is an example, its final stanza possessing a laid-back concision that is beautiful and true:

And you will walk the dog
As always a brown canine
Cat-sized led and leading
Down strange alleys and off-pave
And you will yearn for someone
Else by your side another presence
Another pup leashed and leashing
Dusk into evening into newsprint
Room—books on walls books
On shelves among dawn bamboos
Misted with howler monkeys calling
At B line—designed by Dutch canal artists

But it is in some of the longer poems that Persaud achieves a different kind of concision—one that provides context, fleshing out images and ideas. In the longer works, he is philosophical and playful, imbuing his verse with honesty, force of feeling, and surprise.

In “Colonial Crossing the River Tweed,” an appraisal of things English raises the question of how the colony made England what it is. In “For VSN”, the salient truths of Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul—his whoring, his abuse of women—are juxtaposed with his dedication and literary achievement.

Several of the poems carry a whiff of autobiography or seek to poetise significant historical events. “Kalinyas and Manaharva at Jonestown” is a poignant discussion of the Jonestown tragedy, where more than 900 US citizens died in the jungles of Guyana in 1978. “Badhase Maraj” is one of the stand-outs—a poem that realises autobiography in a few deft sentences, a beautiful rendering of a personality remembered and loved. The poem carries the deadpan humour present in others. Persaud can indeed be funny.

Mattress Makers is a significant collection—ambitious in its sweep and inclusivity, attentive to small and large ideas alike. It is a book to reread over and over again.