‘The Last Time I Saw You’: A compelling portrait of an artist grappling with the loss of his muse

In his poem "Tonight I Can Write", Pablo Neruda states that “Love is so short, forgetting is so long”. Akhil Katyal’s latest collection of poetry, The Last Time I Saw You, is centred around a similar crisis of love and loss. In the very first poem of the collection, "Etymology", Katyal draws this connection, likening grief to “a sudden expansion of time” and “a traffic of remembering”. And it is this exploration into fragments of memory – and its unconscious manifestations – that form the strongest parts of this collection. Even the title – “The Last Time I Saw You” – brings to mind a sense of being anchored in a moment from the past – one that quietly intrudes on the present.

Attraction and dread

Katyal’s poems focus on the routines relationships function within – and how they are interrupted by heartbreak and abandonment. In the poem “First Days”, we enter a sepia-tinged memory of the “dailiness” that a relationship begins to inhabit from its very beginning. While the speaker admits that “the chips were already falling” the first night he spent with the lover, the poem ends in a moment of shared quiet – the lover “quietened the city” for the speaker of the poem....

Read more