Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’, wrote W.H. Auden in memorial for W.B. Yeats. The sentence herds the reader straight into the heart of the matter. It implies that there is a relationship between the poet, or rather poetry, and the social order that condition all literature. In Auden’s overall view, however, this does not amount to much: ‘For Poetry makes nothing happen.’ Further, the question may be asked, did Ireland always have something to do with Yeats’s poetry? What is this relationship between country, history and language? It is often argued that poems are private acts that speak to intensely personal experiences, and should not therefore be generalized to universal conditions.
In this other sense then, poems indeed need not make anything happen. Guru T. Ladakhi’s debut collection of poems, Monk On a Hill, offers an occasion to witness these connections. What kind of spaces resonate within the poems?