Overview

Ajarn David's first bilingual Thai-English collection, Poems from Sakon Nakhon, mapped the landscape, culture, and language of northeastern Thailand with the eye of a true insider. Under the Weeping Fig (Thai Poems of Love & Loss) turns that same clarity inward - to the feelings of the people who live there. The world is the same Isaan world: jasmine garlands at intersections, forest temples in the Phu Phan mountains, the Mekong at sunset. But the gaze is focused on the heart. Written simultaneously in Thai and English by a poet who has spent twenty-four years absorbing Buddhist sensibility until it became a way of seeing, these seventy-two poems move through love the way love actually moves: with longing, humor, quiet grief, and the occasional line you have to put the book down to sit with. A woman dreams of one perfect day in Chiang Khan with the man she loves. Just for one day. A teacher keeps calling the roll after an empty chair appears. A man strokes a beloved head and whispers, ""You can go now."" A monk offers wisdom through a papaya that will either fall or become som tam. The collection opens with a two-line aphorism about the nature of poetry that sets the standard for everything that follows. Alongside its images, it draws on the long Asian tradition of the wisdom verse. The short, plain-spoken teaching that arrives with a truth so cleanly stated it alters something in how you move through the world. On love as non-striving. On traveling light. On the need for gratitude. These are not aphorisms dressed in poetic clothing; they are genuine, shaped by Buddhist teaching, Thai folk wisdom, and two decades of lived experience between the two. The bilingual architecture marks a departure from Ajarn David's first book. In Poems from Sakon Nakhon, the Thai versions were accomplished translations made after the English. Here, both languages arrived often simultaneously. Thai appears first throughout - not as translation but as primary text, with the English following as its companion. The English is compressed into breath-sized lines, where white space performs the emotion; the Thai achieves the same effect through the conversational intimacy the language demands. Romanized pronunciation guides beneath each Thai poem make them speakable, not just readable, for every audience. The Thai love poems speak plainly and without apology. They say ""I love you"" without irony. They end with ""And cried"" when that is exactly what happened. This directness is not naivety. It is a considered rejection of the aesthetic that mistakes guardedness for sophistication, and it produces some of the most formally precise and emotionally durable poems published in either Thai or English in recent years. Taken together, the two collections constitute one of the more complete literary portraits of a life between languages that contemporary poetry has produced. But Under the Weeping Fig also stands entirely on its own. With words that linger in memory. Perfect for: readers of Poems from Sakon Nakhon ready for the next chapter; anyone who has loved and lost and wondered if the right words existed; Thai language learners and expatriates; poets and readers of world literature seeking an alternative to MFA orthodoxy.

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