Going to Darjeeling With My Father

By Nabin K. Chhetri

Poetry I Paperback 

Few if any Nepalese poets before Nabin K. Chhetri have brought their home with them so indelibly to the UK and made a new home in the English language there. Chhetri dwells in the lands of past memories, and present experience, with poignant and precise poems, where a train ride or a camping trip can suddenly take on luminous depths of meaning. This is the British full collection debut of a truly resonant poet.

Nabin K. Chhetri, born in Nepal, is a poet and writer based in Scotland. He holds an M.St in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford and an M.Litt. in The Novel from the University of Aberdeen. His fiction and poetry have received international recognition. He is the director of Mist and Mountain (UK), a Creative platform.

I was swept up by the precision of Nabin Chhetri’s poems, the manner of his telling, of his witness. Chhetri spells out the events of life, often beautiful, often tragic, with unhurried efficiency. The collection reads like a personal history, spanning time and distance. There is a longing to return to children, to lost parents, to lovers. The notion of home and country is uniquely positioned within Chhetri’s work. Home is far away, a place yearned for and often reached only through the labour of imagination: ‘When all the work and wait is done,/I long to go to my country.’ Within the poetry of Nabin Chhetri, with its quiet gathering of power, one is able to visit this longed for destination. 

— Marti Leimbach, Core Tutor, University of Oxford

There is a quiet magic in Nabin Chhetri’s poetry which, if we listen carefully, can attune us to both the stillnesses and vivid urgencies of love, the natural world, memory and loss. Sometimes restlessly questioning, sometimes calm and accepting, sometimes celebratory, these poems take us on a richly painted, powerfully atmospheric journey. It is a journey that honours both Nepal and the north of Scotland, and along the way it touches on every profundity of human life. — Wayne Price, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing, Aberdeen University

These are poems written with a moving lyrical clarity that can be quietly breathtaking. — Jane Draycott, Senior Associate Tutor, University of Oxford

Going to Darjeeling with My Father by Nabin K. Chhetri is a luminous collection that probes the connections that bind us and all the ways we are kept apart. The poems tread the edges between day and night, past and present, the human world and the natural, the body and the ground where it rests in death. While the poems are beautifully written, what really makes this collection sing is its deep desire to take the fleeting and the ephemeral and make them a permanent poetic home. As the speaker of ‘Remembering a Lover’ tells us, ‘I want to go back… somewhere/around the first year of college… I want to stop there forever.’ These are poems where the reader can stop, rest and experience love in all its beauty and struggle.  - Mariah Whelan, author of The Love I Do To You