The Weeds That Grow in Cemeteries

Nirmal Ghosh’s The Weeds That Grow in Cemeteries is a moody, poignant collection of 109 poems of love, loss, and longing. The speaker addresses an unnamed ‘you’, who is always on the verge of departing; their unions and goodbyes play out on cold Irish mornings, across the Perfume River, in the Tuileries amid the flowers of spring, during late summer in Manila, above the tombs of Samarkand. The poet examines how the nature of time changes in the aftermath of loss, how love transforms the seasons, and how elemental forces echo our internal lives. Vivid sensory details of heat and rain; mountains, skies, and birdsong conjure for readers a lively memoryscape, where the natural world merges with the poet’s emotional world. Ghosh’s poetry is sparsely worded, modern, and unsentimental, and yet offers a richly layered view of the human condition.