Vidyan Ravinthiran’s remarkable ability to set the tone of a poem in the colours of landscape and memory is never better served than in this brief, dense excursion into the heartland of Sri Lankan history. By turns erudite and wise – the poet’s sense of his own origins, of his own place in the internecine cultural climate of the island nation’s recent past is explored with the supportive weight of insight – ‘The last train’ is both elegy and reflection refracted through the prism of suggestion.

Here, the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan armed forces and the redundant pachydermic train, are subsumed in the relentless corrosion of time. Finding a fitting metaphor for civil war, for the bitter taste of the aftermath, and for blood in the silent ministry of rust, Ravinthiran’s obsequies are driven by the overwhelmingly ferritic tones of the landscape and the soil; the shadowy figures of the four men, obscured by the contrasting purples of the smoke, yield a relief that is half funerary, half ironic, in this tableau of transience and decline.

The hand of Wordsworth, visible in a luminous italicised overview – ‘the unimaginable / touch of time’ – gives abstract depth to Jaffna’s languid spaces.


‘The last train’ is taken from Avidyā, published by Bloodaxe Books (2025), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

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