Review of "Digitalis and Other Poems"

Digitalis and Other Poems

Written by John Thieme

Published by Setu Publications, Pittsburgh, PA (USA)

ISBN - 978-1-947403-27-7

Price: 940 INR

Language: English, pp.109

John Thieme’s Digitalis resonates as a symphony of contradictions, a poetic pulse oscillating between elegy and insurrection, solitude and communion, the ephemeral whispers of memory and the enduring echoes of myth. Divided into two movements, it juxtaposes solitary poems that wrestle with the spectres of environmental collapse and pandemic isolation against Massiah, a luminous cycle of verse narratives rooted in the vibrant microcosm of a Guyanese barbershop. These interwoven strands form a tapestry of interrogation—colonial legacies unravel, the climate crisis looms, and storytelling emerges as both lamentation and salvation. Thieme’s verse becomes a crucible of complexity, where poetry mourns the irretrievable even as it defiantly cultivates the seeds of renewal.

Elegy for an Imperilled Earth

The collection opens with “Digitalis”, a poem that walks the reader through a landscape scarred by time and human negligence. The speaker’s contemplative stroll past a churchyard, Roman ruins, and a secret graveyard unearthed for a parking lot becomes a meditation on erasure. Thieme’s earth is a silent archivist, its memory longer than epitaphs or history books. “Stones flash fictions of departed lives,” he writes, yet modernity’s “careless dieselled flotsam” intrudes with toxic clouds and apathetic youth. The foxglove, beautiful and poisonous, mirrors humanity’s fraught relationship with nature—a duality echoed in the speaker’s lie to his dog: “It’s all OK.” Here, environmental grief is both intimate and universal, a quiet reckoning with the “ravages of time”.

This elegiac tone deepens in “The Years”, where Frank, a regular in Massiah’s barber shop, laments the destruction of a Guyanese valley by ecotourism developers. The poem’s refrain—“Eat labba and drink creek water / and you will always come back to Guyana”—twists from a proverb of belonging into an indictment of exploitation. The strangers who felled cow wood trees and abandoned half-built roads embody colonial extraction’s cyclical violence. Thieme’s imagery— mudslides erasing “progress”, labba (forest rodents) vanishing—paints a haunting portrait of ecological and cultural loss, where even nostalgia is commodified.

Memory: A Fragile Scaffolding

Memory in Digitalis is unreliable yet indispensable. In “Separations”, the speaker revisits a childhood marked by bomb-site playgrounds and gas-lamp lighters, only to find gentrification erasing the “grimy time of unreflecting boyhood joy”. Thieme questions the stories we tell ourselves: “Do I remember things that never happened?” The poem’s severed worms—“separated halves could live their lives alone”—become a metaphor for identity fractured by time and revision. Similarly, the pandemic poems distill isolation into Gothic imagery: houses haunted by absence, orphaned dogs, and cherry blossoms persisting amid desolation. These poems refuse resolution, lingering in the ache of what is half-remembered and half-invented. Yet storytelling emerges as an antidote to erasure. In “Legba”, the arrival of Papa Legba—a Voodoo spirit bridging worlds—transforms Massiah’s barber shop into a sacred space. Legba’s tales of “uncut trees, unsilted rivers, and green tales the griots told” counter colonial amnesia. His rasping voice weaves myth with history, from leopard spots to “chains and darkened ship-holds”, insisting that trauma and resilience coexist. When he urges listeners to “dig deep inside yuh brainbox” to find their “green land of yuh mind”, Thieme suggests memory as an act of resistance, a way to reclaim agency in a fractured world.

Laughter as Subversion

Amid the collection’s gravity, Thieme wields humour as a weapon. “Happy Poem” revels in linguistic play, somersaulting through palindromes (“Was it a cat, I saw?”) and mocking politicians as “kitsch masters of the half-baked cock and bull”. Its laughter is infectious yet destabilising, smuggling giggles into funerals and letting words “slide off the page” to evade fixity. This anarchic joy mirrors the Arawaks’ subversion in “A Barber’s Tale”, where Columbus’s flag is urinated on and burnt—a carnivalesque rejection of colonial myth-making. Even the enigmatic “Racoon”, a trickster figure spiking drinks and multiplying ambiguously, embodies the chaos of rumour, challenging readers to question narratives of power.

Identity in the Liminal Spaces

The barber shop tales grapple with hybrid identities forged in colonialism’s wake. “Dougla”, a story retold with conflicting details, follows a mixed-race man rejected by both sides during riots. Dougla’s fate—whether he walked into the sea or vanished into the bush—remains unresolved, reflecting the impossibility of belonging in a fractured postcolonial landscape. Thieme’s layered storytelling (“the many versions crystallise as history”) mirrors Massiah’s role as a “one-man register of shrivelled dreams”, where truth is communal and ever-shifting. Similarly, the spiders in Massiah’s rafters, weaving “flags of new-spun cloth”, symbolise identity as a collaborative act, endlessly spun and responded to.

Conclusion: Poetry as Digitalis

Digitalis emerges as a testament to the unyielding gaze, a collection that refuses the comfort of aversion. It confronts the spectres of climate grief, the scars of colonial violence, and the ephemeral threads of memory, yet it clings to poetry’s alchemical power—to both mend and unsettle. Thieme’s foxglove, at once venom and cure, transforms into a luminous metaphor for language itself: a double-edged instrument capable of entombing falsehoods or sowing liberation. In Massiah’s barber shop, where whispers ascend into myth, and within the spectral quiet of the pandemic, Thieme asserts that storytelling is not mere art—it is survival. The collection’s closing tableau—Papa Legba descending into the mundane churn of morning traffic, “a lonely soul” aglow with “inner peace”—distills its essence: even amidst frag.mentation, radiance persists.

Digitalis is not a balm for our age of crisis but a vital provocation, urging us to question, excavate, laugh, remember, and, above all, listen. It is poetry as invocation, resistance, and the pulse of life itself.

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About the Reviewer

Jyotirmoy Joshi, a Ph.D. scholar in English at the University of Lucknow, explores the compelling intersection of Fantasy Literature and Mental Health. A self-confessed Walter Mitty, his vibrant imagination fuels both academic inquiry and real-world adventure – often found riding Himalayan passes on his motorcycle. He proudly identifies as a Liberal Humanist, Ravenclaw, and Bardolater, perspectives shaped by a unique fusion of idyllic fantasy and dark, eccentric thrillers. Beyond academia, his passions include films, doodling, Enlightenment literature, F1, MotoGP. He has contributed insightful work to publications like The Criterion, the prestigious Women's Link and the IIS Journal of Arts, and to Rhetorica, Film Comment, Science Fiction Book Reviews, and Fantasy Café