_{Photo Credit: Naomi Woddis}

I have long been an admirer of Rishi’s poetry and it was an honour to delve into his new book by asking him some questions. There often seems to be a lightness of touch in Rishi’s work and in Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak he skilfully and beautifully combines the weird with the everyday.

Stephen Paul Wren: I love the wit and tenderness throughout the book. Did you assemble the narratives over a lengthy period of time, or did they come at you in a rush?

Rishi Dastidar: Ah, that’s very kind of you to say, thank you. More than the other three books, this is an assemblage over time. The earliest poem in it probably dates to 2016, 2017? (my record keeping is lax, forgive me), so a number of the poems have been gestating a while or waiting for the right place to be collected in. Interesting you say ‘narratives’ regarding this book, as from my perspective, it’s the one where there’s the least amount of focus on that. That is to say: I very deliberately tried to make this feel closer to an assemblage of poems, rather than trying to take readers on an overt arc… that said, there’s an obvious narrative in ‘the break of wave’.

More broadly, when Jane Commane at Nine Arches Press, and I were pulling the book together, one of the things we talked about was the notion that the poems move from the exterior world earlier on – how the 'I' figure might be perceived in work and play – to a more interior, reflective and reflexive world, in the back end of the book. So, there is a narrative there, of sorts, of turning inwards, and hopefully discovering good things.

SPW: How conscious were you of the science around us? In your poem ‘The mesmerising kineticism of Boy Bruce, The Mighty Atom’, you include “electrons electrifying”: the very essence of chemistry!

RD: I retain a passing interest in the sciences (I might have studied Chemistry for A-Level had my maths been better) but I am very wary of claiming anything like an expertise, or a passion to explain, as I think many other writers of all stripes do that so much better than I ever could I’m not consciously aware I was engaging with science as much in this book; perhaps a reaction to the attempts to make ecological science and doom funny in Neptune’s Projects. Many of the poems this time round feel to me to be wrestling with a particularly weak sauce of theological contemplation, the idea that you might find some sort of God in box stores and dance floors as well as cathedrals. That said, I am drawn to something in attempts to express the elemental, whether that is mathematically as a proof, or at an atomic level. And then of course, the metaphorical leap: how do you – can you? – make sense of something that you cannot see with the naked eye? Does painting a verbal picture help? In this particular poem’s case, it started with Bruce Forsyth, as The Mighty Atom was his nickname – it says something of how the Atomic Age still had some notion of residual glamour in the late 1950s / early 1960s doesn’t it? Forsyth seems to me a marvellously emblematic figure of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, how he straddled the ages of music hall and streaming TV. And so there is something there about how science gets used as an emblem of the future – but ends up becoming an emblem of nostalgia also. Such is progress, of course.

SPW: There is a fun spirit of youth pervading some of the book. To what extent are these poems autobiographical (e.g. your poem ‘The late-style of my funk dancing’)?

RD: Ha! Youth! What is that? Is that cloud of dust I see disappearing behind me…? While I am not claiming these as autobiographical poems, are there elements of things that I’ve done, witnessed, that have happened to me, buried within the poems? Absolutely. You’re sharp to pick up on the dancing – I don’t do it much, enough, at all now, and I don’t want to give you the idea I was all out and out raver all the time 30 years ago. But: have some of the happiest, wildest nights of my life been found on dancefloors in sweatboxes? Absolutely. The night I had, dancing to the mad funk DJ Keb Darge was playing at Madame JoJos in Soho… sublime. I think poems can and should draw on that, whether you call it fun, hedonism, whatever. This is all emotions recollected in tranquility etc – but sometimes, it’s just nice that those emotions can be, well, a bit more upbeat than you might expect.

SPW: I am a form man. How did you select the forms in this book Rishi? The poem ‘Rake with Telescopic handle’ moved me. Perhaps you can include this poem in your answer?

RD: Not with any deliberate sense of ‘oh this poem must be in x form.’ I’m far more instinctive than that; a phrase, a set of phrases will in their sound and shape, suggest that it *might* be a sonnet, ghazal, whatever, and I go from there, feeling my way into to be able to judge what form might be emerging. So, for example, if the phrase is lending itself to repetition, then I am asking myself, is this a ghazal, is this a triolet? If there’s something that feels more flighty, or satirical, and / or I’m hearing tetrameter, then I’m thinking Onegin sonnet. There’s no science here, just ear, eye, and judgement tending to stabs in the dark. And sometimes they work. And thank you for the kind word about Rake; it demonstrates the tightness in shape that I like when writing freer verse.

Rake with telescopic handle

Autumn is doing its optimistic thing again, 
where it distracts from thoughts 
of death by going ‘look at the pretty

colours though!’ As if anything bad 
can happen when the back garden 
is a sea of foolish russets, whispering

golds. Dad has bought a wide-mouthed 
rake with a telescopic handle with which 
to beat back the tide of silver birch

leaves; the oak is due to get its winter 
coat on in a few weeks’ time, he smiles – 
might need to make the handle longer

for those. In the middle of my cardboard 
scoop there is a leaf still bright, still green, 
not ready to let go of itself just yet. 

SPW: I noticed some additional poems are relevant to my previous question about form (‘A leopard parses his concern’) and scientific language (your poems ‘Chromophilia (song for B)’ and ‘Reverse ghazal daguerrotype’). Sorry for my eye for detail but do you have any comments Rishi?

RD: That makes it sound like a police investigation! I’m not hiding anything Officer Wren! Leopard (and A man of theory) have those 14 units very deliberately. Despite appearances I think of them as sonnets. I’ll claim anything 14 lines long as a sonnet to be quite honest. Let’s call these ‘exploded sonnets’, then – 14 lines in which to play, however long the lines or the fragments might be. I suppose I would have to draw the line at calling them sonnets if the 14 lines expanded into 14 paragraphs. In ‘Chromophilia’ I was definitely trying to make a callback to the work of artist David Batchelor, around ‘chromophobia’, his exploration of people’s fear of things being too colourful. So, I just reversed it, which felt apt for the fizziness going on in that people. It’s meant to be joyful; what’s more joyful than lots of splashes of colour everywhere?

SPW: Gosh, I like your suggested humble tone which characterises ‘Not Alexander the Great’. Do you feel alone here, or have you noticed similar feelings are elicited in others?

RD: Hmmm; is it humble though? I think of that poem as giving voice to a man who has been humbled. But maybe he deserves to be right? Who goes round thinking they might be even a bit like Alexander the Great? That’s verging on the hubristic, no? The reference here is to Sid Waddell’s famous bit of commentary when he declared, “When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer … [Eric] Bristow's only 27.” I think there are plenty of men moving into middle age, and beyond, who’s mid-life crises are less about realising that life is finite, and more about the fact that they finally have to give up on the ambitions that they nursed and never vocalised to anyone. The disappointments that are deeper because they never hit the air, you never had the courage to share them. The gap between your dreams and your reality is painful if you look into that chasm too long. I suspect many of us have been writing about *that* forever, though I grant you that fewer of us might use TV darts coverage as the inciting point.

SPW: The final poem (‘Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak’) spoke to me. It felt like a blueprint for successful relationships. I feel like there is wisdom here. Poetry can be a vehicle to speak into modern times and the challenged, right?

RD: Ah well that’s lovely to hear. Again, I wouldn’t go as far to suggest that the poem offers any form of advice (apart from maybe talking less hornswoggle…) I leave it to others to judge if there is wisdom here… put it this way; I don’t feel wise, never really have done. I hope that in conversation at least, if not on the page, I can offer some solace and insights to friends as and when that might be needed… Your later point: absolutely, yes. Most of the contemporary poetry I read is brilliant at doing precisely what you say: looking at, weighing up, the cacophony, the overwhelm of living in this present moment, what it might be doing to us and saying: ‘Friend, it’s OK, more of us feel the same way you do than you think.’ This has always been one of a poem’s jobs – to offer consolation over time. The ones that do that over more than 50 years we call classic and stick in the canon. But it is happening now, today. And I’m honoured beyond words if anyone takes any consolation out of any of my poems.

SPW: Thanks for writing such a charming book of poems!

Rishi Dastidar’s fourth collection, Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak (Nine Arches Press), was published in March 2026. He chairs Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing, and is a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust.