Review by Usha Kishore
Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island (2013-15), and author of
Thirtha (Yuganta Press, 2002) Behind Dark Waters (Plain View Press, 2008), Draw Me Inmost
(Stockport Flats, 2009), Trace (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Thirteen Days to Let Go (Aldrich
Press, 2015), and Slow Ripening (Local Gems, 2016) is an award winning poet who teaches
English and Women’s Studies at Nassau Community College, New York. Author of numerous
essays on poetics as well as creative non-fiction, she is also the 2011 Walt Whitman Birthplace
Association Long Island Poet of the Year.
Multicultural
fluidity and a resonant voice that bridges the earthy and the esoteric
Pramila
Venkateswaran’s poetry touches the heart, inspires the mind and stirs the soul.
It is characteristic of diasporic
writing where Indian myth meets Western form, narrative traverses continents
and assimilation mingles with difference.
Venkateswaran’s two chapbooks Thirteen
Days to Let Go (Kelsay Books, Aldrich Press, 2015) and Slow Ripening (Local
Gems, 2016) exhibit multicultural fluidity and a resonant voice that bridges
the earthy and the esoteric.
Slow Ripening is an
exploration of the rites of passage, from youth to age and the wisdom that
comes with age and experience; here, the poet draws comparisons with the
natural world, brings back memories and poetises Indian myth. Myth
is elicited in “Mirages,” a poem, based on the Indian epic, Mahabharatha, which narrates the story
of the warring Pandavas and Kauravas and evinces how the seeds of war are sown
into the mind of man. The poem opens
with Duryodhan mistaking water for blue tiles in his cousins’ palace of
illusions at Indraprastha and closes with the grave foreshadowing of war. In the current geo-political climate, the
poem seems to be a metonym for the exchange of rhetoric and war mongering among
nations:
…this
time
with his flowing robes
he
stepped into the shock of
water
and the wicked laughter
of his
cousins, egged on by their friend,
Krishna,
who knew it only takes a seed
for war
to ripen in one’s heart.
Indian
superstitions are a living myth. People
believe in them so intensely that it affects their day to day lives. In “Hiding from the Eclipse,” Venkateswaran
explores, in the form of a childhood memory, one of the many superstitions
associated with the lunar eclipse. The
belief that pregnant women have to conceal themselves from the eclipse, lest
their unborn babies are affected, is described in:
“Does
the moon think baby is the sun?”
“She
might,” said mother, and I imagined
the
moon sailing into our street and into
mother’s ball of a belly and sailing out again,
bloated,
and I was glad we were hiding
from
the moon’s voracious appetite.
“What is April Ripe For?” is a ghazal
and draws from the poet’s personal
experience of Swamiji jokes, her teacher’s relief of the ending of semesters,
exams and the celebration of success and her musings of the natural world in “dawn
parading the magic ink of April.” The
poem has a Chaucerian ring to it, reminding one of: Whan that
Aprille with his shoures soote/ The droghte of Marche hath perced to the
roote/And bathed every veyne in swich licour.
Venkateswaran’s
lines echo in unison, also bringing in a plethora of visual and auditory images
of the Spring season such as bird migration and flowers, while employing
pathetic fallacy in thoughts that rejuvenate the mind of man and verse
rebirthing in poets: Mallards bobbing on speckled waves, artic terns
floating in the wind, geese honking April April and purple crocuses showing
their faces among garden trash. The poem
closes, in true ghazal style,
pertaining to the title of the collection, relating to aging and experience:
The
gloom of winter has withered my skin and robbed my heart.
If
Pramila is to be restored, it can only happen in April.
In
contrast, “Dear Cosmetic Companies” is a pungently humorous epistle that writes
the aging process of the female body. In
true ecriture feminine, the poetic persona examines herself in the
mirror and discovers grey hair above the temples, “crows’ feet” “blackheads
popping like mustard seeds” and the “pale stretch of skin, breathing blue,
rising toward dipping nipples.” The
poetic voice then appeals to the cosmetic companies for eternal youth and calls
for the universal understanding of “female thingamajigs.”
I
am writing to you to save me, dear deities
of eternal ripeness of youth,
work your magic, make my skin
supple,
my face glow with the gold of your
creams…
…send me potions for my twin mounds
to assume their rightful glory…
The
reflection on the current state of the world and the USA comes across in powerful
poems like “Two Voices” and “He Runs, the Policeman Pulls out his Rifle.” The poet ponders on gun crime, terrorism,
history (Jallianwalla Bagh) and what
it is like to live in America:
…I don’t
want to hear Guantanamo,
Hiroshima,
Birmingham, now we can walk
our
streets in peace, Fergusson, South Carolina,
shoot
–to-kill-black men-like-rabid-dogs powerful
for after
all we are ashes, ashes, we all fall down,
a free
society. (“Two Voices”)
Other poems with impact are the “Grand Piano in Gaza” and the ekphrastic “Magritte’s Le Viol (The Rape), 1934.” The former is a villanelle, highly structural, with its five tercets and a quatrain and its repeated rhymes and refrains; but poignantly moving as it is based on the BBC report of the salvaging of the grand concert piano of the Nawras Theatre in northern Gaza:
Some here reject music as haram, as if it would cloud
Reason. But the bombs missed a Sara or Miriam
As she played the keys now waiting to be restored.
The ekphrastic poem outlines the predicament of womanhood and its susceptibility to rape and violation; this is an angry female poem:
You painted breasts in place of her eyes,
an untrimmed vagina instead of a nose,
a rectum for the mouth,
as if to say anatomy is all the rapist sees.
Or did you want to say that men
see only her sex on woman’s face?
The
defence of modern poetry in “Gripes about Poetry’s Dire Prediction,” reminds
one of Jonathan’s Swift’s satire The
Battle of the Books:
Those lines from tradition that you think is real art
have misogyny and racism stiffened into rigor mortis
after modern poetry waged its war on the battlefield
of free verse, rescuing readers on the
front lines plagued
by friendly fire, who thought change was the
death of poetry.
and the
“Museum of Ex-es” makes you chuckle at the
humorous reality of life:
Time
will help the ex-es become extinct like dinos
and
decades or centuries from now, their bones
will
be placed in a museum of Ex-es, so the jilted,
divorced,
separated and spurned can visit
to feel
the warm twist of schadenfreude.
Thirteen Days to
Let Go, a threnody to the poet’s father, is a
collection that echoes the highly personal voice of the poet, highlighting her
ambiguous relationship with her father, her Indian background, her musings on
life and the diasporic Indian’s dilemma of home and abroad. One of the most conspicuous poems of the
chapbook is the eponymous Thirteen Days
to Let Go. Set in 13 sections, the
poem chronicles the Tamil Brahman funerary rites brought to the reader in
striking imagery and vivid metaphors. The poem is an outpouring of grief, anger
and broken relationship and at the same time, a reconciliation with the death
of a parent. This poem like the funeral
is a ritual, it grieves for the departed, recalls memories, offers rites and
prayers for the deceased and celebrates life.
Opening with the poignant line: “Finally I am in your absence,” the poem
progresses to the numbness that overwhelms an offspring on parental bereavement
in the second section, when the poetic
persona flies home to attend her father’s funeral:
Flying
across an ocean and two continents
confused
between day and night,
knees
stiff, throat dry, I sat frozen
trying
to focus on your struggle
toward
death.
The
poet emphasises on the patriarchal Hindu funerary rites in Section 3. Traditionally Hindu women are not empowered
to conduct funerary rites for their parents; that right rests solely with the
male offspring:
I
don’t carry
the flaming branch
to the
pyre,
but
light the fire of words
awakening
the soul
to the
numinous.
The
poet however wants to exercise the right of language in order to awaken the deceased
father’s soul to the numinous. There is
regret here and a degree of pain in the differences with the father, which now
needs to be resolved in his absence:
Where is your disconnection?
Your frustration and mine?
The in-between years?
…The well of anger has dried.
Joy I keep fenced like
the endangered.
The
combatting of loss and the coming to terms with it are brilliantly expressed in:
My anguish
is a fog I carry
in
my chest.
The
ritual of a Hindu funeral is listed and the loss is measured in:
Three
rows of ritual rice balls:
You are in the first row. Your ancestors
cast next to you gleam like planets
Mantras
chanted at the funeral become words of the poem: these words I speak to reach your realm/…these mantras are alphabets of
longing.
In
this collection, the poet’s pre-occupation with death is synonymous with her
mourning. for her father:
This
winter, death is at every corner.
In every house, a ghost clings until
the
bier vanishes behind gray trees. (“Ceremony”)
Death
pervades the whole collection. Even a
boat trip in Kerala usher in thoughts of drowning:
What
if the boat splits, the motor shuts,
and we drown, burqas, saris, shirts
spreading, later washing upon some
unknown shore… (“Sailing to
Fort Kochi”)
“Winds
rip our time together” and “murmurs refuse to fade” as memory haunts the
mourning and the poet finds it difficult to reconcile. However, reflections on life and nature allude
to our own limited time on earth as the poet ponders on mortality. The temporal and spiritual dimensions are
measured out in a Dickinsonian undertone:
How
long will grid and clock march me?
I am wood cut to size, anima escaped
from the reining in. (“The Unfolding”)
Venkateswaran’s voice has a resilient power in
its reflections. She mediates wilfully
on nature, life and memories. Her
diction is sophisticated, her sensibility relatable to any reader of poetry, in
the West or the East. Her verse has an
ambience that draws the reader into her poetical world that lies somewhere
between India and the USA, replete with images of cultural and geographical
significance:
By
the waters of the Hudson
two thoughts embraced
out of the sacred union
was born
light
…You are Noor. You are light.
(“You are Noor, You are Light”)
