Published 2022. Paperback, 90pp, 9x6ins, £10.95
ISBN 9781848618275 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Poetry Book Society Choice, 3rd Quarter 2022. Not for sale in North America.
Goethe’s version of the scholar’s fateful wager with Mephistopheles inspires the central sequence of Faust,
mapped onto the figure of the migrant who flees a postcolonial legacy of fire, displacement and climate destruction for a life of eternal striving. As Parmar asks in ‘The Winnowing Shovel’: ‘How is striving itself, as an idea built into literary models and real-life stereotypes of the good immigrant or the model minority, how might striving — in the Faustian sense — provide a way of thinking about heroism, tragedy (modern and ancient) and migratory grief? Who chooses to leave and why, who attempts to return, who stays on, who, to borrow from Bhanu Kapil’s image of reverse migration, is made psychotic in a national space, who is this hero who journeys, who strives and for what? To be visible or invisible? As others have looked to the Faust legend for ways to explore the insatiability of man’s appetites, the questions I put to Goethe’s version specifically bring together three strands: striving as a fear of and countermeasure against mortality; a critique of globalisation and technology; and the female element underlying male aggression, destruction and desire.’ From Goethe to Elizabeth Bishop, Vivien Eliot to Winckelmann, Homer and Marilyn Monroe — Faust
’s poems meditate on the accruement of loss and of the impossibility of home.
'Every generation deserves its own version of Faust. Echoing Goethe’s cross-genre masterpiece, Parmar combines poems with essays, diaries, memoir and searing political critique. Instead of bargaining with the devil for pleasure and knowledge, Parmar’s Faust is a female migrant striving in a foreign land against hardship and stigma, in an antiheroic story about grief and migration, land and empire, seeds and miscarriages, the price of knowledge and the cost of neoliberalism. Parmar uses the second person plural with a frightening eloquence that burns. “Go home then – / Why did you come here,” the speaker asks. Everywhere we are confronted by questions of longing and “unbelonging”. Parmar turns Goethe’s Faustian pact on its head, focusing entirely on human agency and our “countermeasure against mortality”, while investigating the complex correlations between grain and harvest, climate change and economy, dowries and gender inequalities. Her lines are visually disorienting, but her rhythms possess a fluid continuity akin to forces of resistance: “Kernels of rain or seeds of rain / is how raindrops translate / so that even the rain is not itself.” An ambitious intellectual powerhouse, the book is also lit up by many tender moments, such as “grief is not pointless, its mourning or melancholy offers something when there is nothing to show for death”. It reminds us that unmaking a myth is also a form of myth-making.' —Kit Fan, The Guardian
Comments on Eidolon
:
“Sandeep Parmar’s Eidolon visits some of the same places as Cross’s Beyond the Sea , but in a different mode and through a more recognisably modern, or at least Anglo-American, feminist cultural perspective, exploring the Helen myth via her status as an eidolon, ‘fixed yet unfixed’ (Whitman, ‘Eidolons’): false-image, idea, demi-goddess, cultural sign (dreaded word: icon) or emblem of destructive female beauty, political intriguing and treachery. Parmar’s Helen is a modern woman, sexting her dates and protesting her innocence; but this is no cheap modern knock-off of a classical myth, instead it is a delicate and insightful exploration of women’s status in the ancient world, the construction of an enduring female archetype, its overturning, and a sequence of love poems in a beautiful and evocative open-form, projective verse, to women surviving in the aftermath of these myths, floating in an air of disconnection. I can’t believe how well this long poem works, shimmering and darting forwards, glittering with linguistic jewels, bristling with insight.” —John Muckle, PN Review
“Eidolon emerges in the reader’s vision as that ‘reincarnation’ that is at once empowered, prophetic, and questioning.” — Nabina Das, Mascara Review
“Some eighty years ago Llewelyn Powys wrote to a young poet, who had sent him a manuscript, ‘Try to leave Fantasy and get down to the reality of pots and pans, out of such inauspicious matter poetry will leap new born’. For me Sandeep Parmar’s poetry does this and with her pen she stirs to life a world that disappeared over two thousand years ago.” —Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence
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