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Smita Agarwal. Wish-Granting Words,
Ravi Dayal, Price Rs.70, Pages 43, ISBN 81-7530-046-9.

Thachom Poyil Rajeevan. He Who Was Gone Thus,
Yeti Book, Price Rs.125, Pages 97, ISBN 81-88330-15-9.

Anita Nair. Malabar Mind,
Yeti Books, Price Rs.150, Pages 97, ISBN 81-88330-00-0.

Reshma Aquil. Sleeping Wind,
Ethos Books (Singapore), Price $12.00, Pages 50,
ISBN 981-04-3701-3.

Anurima Banerji. Night Artillery,
TSAR Books (Canada), Price $13.95, Pages 60,
ISBN 0-920661-90-4.

   Some poems in Smita Agarwal’s debut collection, Wish-Granting Words, have appeared in various magazines and Nine Indian Women Poets (OUP) — but now we savour her well-travelled poetry within a single spine, poems that have the fine tenor of a practised musician.

   Agarwal’s concerns include pain both personal and social, observations of nature, and the self-conscious act of writing itself:

                    My eyes lick them off the page;
                    I chew them, suck the juices,
                    Let the flavours seep in. I am
                    The dreamer; words, the cocoon
                    I knit                   (‘The Word-Worker’)

   Also unsurprisingly — she being a singer herself — many of her poems are inspired by elements in the broader field of the arts. An example is a poem entitled ‘Samyukta at Khajuraho’, dedicated to the classical Indian artist Shubha Mudgal.

   He Who Was Gone Thus by Thachom Poyil Rajeevan brings a bilingual poet to the fore. The strength of his poetry is rooted in the authentic evocation of the South Indian landscape of Kerala, especially his ability to do so with acute detail and clarity. We can smell, feel, and participate fully in the world he paints with his words.
   In the poem ‘Scream’, we see the wonderful interplay of landscape, history, and Christianity. The inherent overlaying of the Malayalam and English tongues add a subtle, but an important linguistic texture to his free-verse poetry.

   He Who Was Gone Thus by Thachom Poyil Rajeevan is a promising debut, a welcome addition to contemporary English poetry in India.

   After Anita Nair’s fiction, Satyr of the Subway & Eleven Other Stories, The Better Man, and Ladies Coupé, comes Malabar Mind — her debut poetry volume — is, according to her publisher’s misleading blurb, “meanwhile-back-to-real-life-school-of-poetry”. Her poetry is rather better, more wide-ranging, and acutely observed than the publisher’s comment vaguely implies.

   Her poems are deeply rooted in the South Indian landscape — full of gods, myths, colour, heat, and the tropical profusion of the terrain. Here is a good example from the opening section of the poem, ‘Mostly a Man. Sometimes a God’:

                    Know this, woman
                    Clasped around my forearm are a thousand suns.
                    The mark of who I am
                    Mostly a man, sometimes a God.
                    Crawling, marauding
                    I feel your eyes
                    Trace vermilion, turmeric and rice paint paths
                    Slashing the brown silk of my skin.

   Elsewhere in the book, we travel ‘The Highway[s]’ of Anita Nair’s mind/land/scapes — to ‘Brindavan’ and experience the subtle ‘Happenings On The London Underground’. We also listen to ‘An Ostrich’s Love Song’ and meet other characters, while “sunshine, grass and sly desires” inhabit her poem ‘Hello Lust’.

   Reshma Aquil’s Sleeping Wind is an elegant book of sparse wellconstructed poems: “Edges curl / A cankerous rosebud. / The earth exhales a sigh! / Confusing birds” (‘Solar Eclipse’). Aquil’s poetry is that of evocations, of events recalled, and of “innocence redeemed”. She boldly experiments with structure, especially the two-line couplet form, and the delightful concrete poem ‘Motorboat’ shaped like waves captured in wake: “A motorboat has / Burst the evening open. / Over the river’s glass / Tremble several suns. / The waters leap / To a dazzling gold….”; ending beautifully as the craft “hovers / Like a dark moth / Over another flower.”

   Anurima Banerji’s provocative book-title, Night Artillery, unsurprisingly deals with love, lust, body, and passion: “like a secret smile at midnight / in the heart of my palm // you come (soft) through orphaned magenta / through marble veins and muscle” (‘Madhur’). In this poem, the imagery is unusual, intimate, and full of lyrical turns. But many of her other poems tend to be overstated and syrupy (e.g.: “skin to skin, / this satyam shivam sundaram, / sruti and smriti”), perhaps pandering to Orientalist exoticism.