Poetry book of the month: Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar

In Rishi Dastidar’s Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak, his playful yet profound fourth collection, fun is such a prevalent force it becomes a fourth-person presence. As aliens steal the job of ghosts, mythical serpents overindulge in Skittles, and big ideas “mingle together like diplomats” at fancy balls, a question emerges from this delightfully surreal chaos: do poets take themselves too seriously?

“Shed majesty, for a moment,” Dastidar dares in Playing tag, enlivening the dusty idea of lineage and literary canon through a game of chase. Though poets of the present follow in footsteps of the past, Dastidar suggests, we are not obliged to tread the same track. Instead, we can “put down a role, skip fate’s / protestations, let white water / wash away everything / but the here and now”. We can loosen up, lighten up – and even have a laugh.

Instead of sublime revelations, we are given the downtrodden figure of the “fool”. Dastidar adopts this persona through self-mocking asides (“Oh now I’m distracted by which is / the better metaphor for love: / the storm or the flame; it was best / when you were both, at once”) and metaphorical nitpicking, as in How to verb a sore heart: “I don’t know the correct / verb to use right now. Is it ease? But then / does your heart need rest, or a reset? Is it heal?” The speaker cries when “taken for / a fool again”, yet knows only a fool would care – sneers of being “such / a clown” are swiftly corrected: “No I am sublime.” As he wisely reflects, “here’s the / funny thing about respect: it transcends / rather than soothes; it’s not a balm for / the tongue-lashed.”

Dastidar owes something of this insight to his parallel life as a brand strategist – a career that some poets, in his words, might find “icky”. The job nevertheless tunes him in to the “dirty secret” of “modern capitalism”. We live in a social media-driven world of “fake personalities”, replete with dismal rituals such as sadfishing – the trend of producing “despairing, might delete later” posts to generate sympathy. In such an environment, Dastidar wrote recently in an essay in The Author, books are “fast-moving consumer goods – think chocolates, soft drinks, washing powder – that no one ever acknowledges in that way, because it would destroy a lot of the polite dialogue that we have around how we write and why”.

Defeatist but never dull, this poet knows he “shall never conquer the world. I am / 42 and I can’t even conquer a scrubby / back yard.” Even so, with thematic range spanning raunchy recollection (“patterned chatter turning my / orgasm into a cord that cannot be / unplugged. Who’s at the end of the line? / Only the fine-minded ghosts of who we / were”) to religious devotion (heavenly “raptures [...] glow” like “a sun you carry in your pocket”), Dastidar valiantly tries.

As cherry blossom trees gain a spectral hue at night – part of his ghost-alien fascination – so too does this book cast the banal in a dazzlingly uncanny light. From bowls of ramen soup to “bullshit jobs” or the papery “dream / of micro-living” during a visit to Ikea, each stanza contains a surprise that keeps the reader on their toes. I felt myself flicking onwards with a growing taste for Dastidar’s bizarre inventions – such as the mind of the man, one of his absurd characters, that clings to the taste of tuna “like an / angry goose barnacle / to an Ethiopian battleship”. Here, “balloons are sentient” and unafraid to say so. Fusing sincerity, subversion and sheer fun, Dastidar is just as unapologetic.

Meanwhile in Ebisu by Rishi Dastidar

He tried to banish the
tuna fish sandwich
from his mind. But
it refused to leave.

It hung there like an
angry goose barnacle
to an Ethiopian battleship,
pitching and listing –

or was that his stomach?
Meanwhile in Chelsea
a girl, just a girl she says
implausibly, is standing in

front of her bowl of ramen,
asking it not to be overrated.

Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar is published by Nine Arches Press (£11.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £10.79. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Jo Straube/Millennium Images