topics: |  poetry | single-author | india | english

Many - perhaps most - of the poems don't work that well for me.  Some I
like.  "Love in a bathtub" is powerful, and reminds me of something,
perhaps a Japanese Haiku, that i can't quite recall now, or did I once
wrote something like it?  Two pregnancy poems - White Asparagus and 
The need to recall the journey strike me, though the latter tends to
verbosity.  Some poems, like The stare have thematic promise, but the
constructs (for me) don't live up to it.

White Asparagus p.98

Who speaks of strong currents
streaming through the legs, the breasts
of a pregnant woman
in her fourth month?

She’s young, this is her first time,
she’s slim and the nausea has gone.
Her belly’s just starting to get rounder
her breasts itch all day,

and she’s surprised that what she wants
is him
        inside her again
Oh come like a horse, she wants to say,
move like a dog, a wolf,
                   become a suckling lion-cub -

Come here, and here, and here –
but swim fast and don’t stop.

Who speaks of the green coconut uterus
the muscles sliding, a deeper undertow
and the green coconut milk that seals
her well, yet flows so she is wet
from his softest touch?

Who understands the logic
behind this desire?
Who speaks of the rushing tide
                 that awakens
her slowly increasing blood – ?
And the hunger
         raw obsession beginning
with the shape of the asparagus:
sun-deprived white and purple-shadow-veined,
she buys three kilos
of the fat ones, thicker than anyone’s fingers,
she strokes the silky heads
some are so jauntily capped...
        even the smell pulls her in–

Love in a Bathtub 106

Years later we'll remember the bathtub
the position of the taps
the water, slippery
as if a bucketful of eels had joined us ...
we'll be old, our children grown up
but we'll remember the water sloshing out
the useless soap,
the mountain of wet towels.
'Remember the bathtub in Belfast?'
we'll prod each other -

The Stare p. 13

	[This poem started off well, but then it fails to carry through.
 	 e.g. i find the lines "where the young monkey child /is not in
 	 captivity" quite intrusive of the poet; she could have described the
 	 same by saying he was on a tree etc. perhaps]

There is that moment
when a human child
stares
at the young monkey child
who stares back -

Innocence facing
innocence in a space
where the young monkey child
is not in captivity

There is purity
   clarity
there is a transparence
   in this stare
which lasts a long time...

eyes of water
eyes of the sky

the soul can fall through

because the monkey
has yet to learn fear
and the human has yet to learn fear
let alone arrogance

witnessing it all
one can count eyelashes
one can count snails
in the grass
    while waiting
for eyes to blink
waiting to see who
will look away first
...