Reviewed by Karen Pierce Gonzalez
Legato Without a Lisp
by Sanjeev Sethi
CLASSIX
September 2024, Paperback, 121 pages, ISBN-13: 978-8119858798
There are many doors and windows within Sanjeev Sethi’s poetic body. They open and close seamlessly upon command in his newly released Legato Without A Lisp. We can travel some portals back into the deeply-felt pins and pricks of adolescence and step into thresholds of ripened maturity. Both offer poignant moments of intimacy with others as well as with the poet himself.
Such awareness, found in this well-paced 117-page collection, is contagious. It is impossible to read stanza after stanza without wondering if perhaps he is writing about us:
From Rendering:
I thought I had concealed
all there was to cover
until my skin began to spill.
From Earnings:
Sometimes, I fall out
of my center.
I am callous and
incapable of being
sensile to myself.
From Fealties:
Early on, I learned to carry
An imaginary booklight.
It assisted in looking through
my inner leaf amid eclipses.
Even though Sethi is a seasoned writer with eight published collections, he manages to see the world he lives in with a freshness that keeps it ageless. One example can be found in Helotry, a richly evocative poem that bears the universal flavor of longing that we all have tasted:
As the waves play with my feet
feelers from your end
flicker on the stems
of a response.
There is no equivalence.
One of us loved;
the other was in love.
And, of course, Rendezvous; a poem capable of holding agape and eros in the same breath.
In the hushed mounting
of horizons
I burst into your vennels
of vocabulary and
through them into a lemming of lust.
You tow me to a place
where the fault lines of fantasy
meet the unfamiliar, and I begin
to ask myself:
Why isn’t this for me?
Legato Without a Lisp is an orchestration that ties together various life notes that do not fragment our wholeness or create stoppage points between us and those we interact with. The melody created here has a rippling effect that captures and offers, without lecture or dogma, experience-earned wisdom about how to live with one another in the world at large:
In a hermitage of my making, chaos chooses
my nook, as I cannot monitor the movements
in my neighborhood and beyond.
Like this hullabaloo. No one chooses to be a
sourpuss. Let your indulgences be yours.
Some are even happy for you.
…
For future activities, exult however or with
whomever you want; don’t make a spectacle
of it. No one gains, not even you.
Sethi adds a pinch of humor and a dash of humiliation as well. These humane spices not only endears him to us, but also endear us to ourselves.
Anecdote
On the lips of an argument
my tongue
seeks another alcove,
an alien one.
…
But as my anger-pistol
births sweat bullets;
you infridigate the atmosphere
by switching on the air conditioning.
And I’m left with this lyric.
There is an unmistakable generosity of sharing in these tightly written 102 poems that invites us in. And we can stay as long as we want because there aren’t ‘No trespassing signs’ to keep us out or cut us off. We can follow the music this collection offers because the flow from one universal feeling to the next moves freely throughout the book.
About the reviewer: Karen Pierce Gonzalez is an award winning writer and artist. More than 60 of her images have been published. Her chapbooks include Coyote in the Basket of My Ribs, Down River with Li Po, and Raven Song.