A Different Distance
Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr
Reviewed by Shalini Rana
At first glance, A Different Distance might appear to grapple with what, right now, hits too close to home and persists still: the global COVID-19 pandemic—but Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr’s shared strength lies in the renga form, a genre of Japanese linked-verse poetry, which skillfully transports us back into those vestiges of beauty, devastation, confusion, and shared grief we all experienced and witnessed in March 2020.
Spanning a whole year from the start of France’s lockdown, these poems quietly haunt—offering the poets’ observations of street scenes and global news events when observing in isolation was all one could do. Naïr notices the juxtaposition of pigeons crowded together on sidewalks while humans on the same ground must heed social distancing. And Hacker gives voice to how we all once felt in our homes—a “perplexed self, desiring” while “home becomes exile.” The political unrest that continues to reverberate now, over a year later, arrives brilliantly in Naïr’s fine-tuned lyric—for example, a “national uncaring” towards the pandemic and disregard for the “nameless” became mottos of international governments. However, amid strained hope, Hacker and Naïr focus on those small glints of beauty, such as “every wave, every clap during our ‘locked-in’ days,” or as Naïr poignantly puts it—those “galloping months.”
Although the poems observe and reflect outward, their gazes are uniquely intimate, perhaps mirroring the witnessing and introspecting many of us did during the first phases of the pandemic. I can’t help but imagine that this renga practice between Hacker and Naïr provided some relief, consistency, and comfort to the poets during those early, difficult days. As I read, comfort it certainly did provide.