The Queen’s Play

by Aashish Kaul

Roundfire Books

ISBN 978-1-78279-861-3

Reviewed by SUBHASH JAIRETH

Queen Mandodari’s Clever Play

Once upon a time in a kingdom on a little island lived a queen by the name of Mandodari (the ‘soft-bellied’).  The king was busy fighting wars and so bored, or perhaps to challenge her husband’s authority, she invented a new board game. No, the game wasn’t new but a modification of Chaturanga, a board game popular in ancient India.  The changes the queen introduced turned the game into something similar to what we now know as chess.

This imagined invention of chess by Mandodari, the wife of King Ravana, one of the ultimate prototypes of evil in the Indian epic Ramayana, is at the centre of Aashish Kaul’s intriguing novel. The dare of this conceit played upon us by the author is as breathtaking as the act of disruption the queen herself crafts. The epic’s narrative fabric of stories within stories is sliced open to retrieve a little string from which a clever writer like Kaul can weave his own stories.

“The need for tales they say arose, when the fetters came stuck round our ankles with a clank of inevitability, when our wings were torn slowly the earth’s fierce pull, when even the skill of climbing trees or perching on a branch was forgotten. And yet the longing remained.” These are the words with which Kaul begins his story. Like most writers, a longing to explain the urge to tell stories also drives Kaul’s project. A writer self-conscious of his own design and intent, Kaul is ultimately aware of the limitations all stories, including epics, are burdened with.  Limitations announced emphatically in the final pages of the book by one of the narrators: “Thus it occurred to you that not even of your story were you the hero. Privilege and history overran you there as well.” Desire to make and tell stories drive us because it is meant to remain unconsummated. The satisfaction that comes our way is not only transient but also illusory.

In a way, the longing that takes hold of Mandodari forcing her to transform the board game is quite similar to the longing most writers feel. The board game Mandodari invents is not merely a game but also a symbolic space within which new stories can be imagined and told by playing the game. In fact playing of the game, moving this or that piece, and imagining and calculating consequences of the moves aren’t different from the way writers make their stories. Thus, the board game, the origin of which Kaul wants to imagine, turns into a trope of story-telling itself.

Mandodari introduces two vital modifications to the game of Chaturanga: discarding the rolling of dice, and introducing the figure of queen as a piece on the board. Once the dice is removed the role of chance in the game and that of fate in life are challenged. One can now become a master of one’s own destiny. Freedom to exercise one’s will and act is there to enjoy. Suddenly Mandodari begins to remind me of a modernist informed by the traditions of European Enlightenment. “Why was the dice abandoned?” Asks the narrator in the novel. “For one reason alone. That fate ruled the board as it ruled us,” he explains soon after.

But Mandodari isn’t merely a modernist. In her I also spot traces of a latent proto-feminist. In the game invented by her, the most powerful piece on the board is the figure of the queen. All power resides with it. It can move freely in all directions. The power of the figure of the king, on the other hand, is drastically curtailed. The moves it is allowed are minor, restricted and almost ritualistic. His fate is nothing but to turn into a mere symbol of victory or defeat.  Kaul’s Mandodari is clever. The ‘soft-bellied’ queen has guts.

Most of the story in the novel is told in the third-person voice of an omniscient narrator. His power is occasionally disrupted by two narrators who prefer to talk in first person. One of them is most probably Hanuman, commonly known to readers familiar with the epic Ramayana as the monkey-god.  The identity of the other narrators remains illusive. He appears and disappears as if he were a piece on Mandodari’s board game. Narrative time also shifts from past to present without any warning. I found these changes abrupt and unsettling. But the irritation was soon assuaged by luminous prose, its rhythmic movement and its poetic cadences. There are many passages that lingered in my mind. Here is one: “During the day, sparrows the size of a child’s fist with indigo and blue patterned crowns and sword-like erect tails, flitted in the hedgerows enclosing the yard, splashing colour everywhere, and in the evening, before the pine torches had pushed the darkness further into itself, a martin returning to a nearby tree would sometimes brush its open wings against my cheek.”

The book begins with a note from the author. “Among many things that this book is,” it says, “that every book is, it is a book about chess. Not chess as we know it, but chess as was known at the time in which the story is based.” I deliberately ignored the note and read it after I had read the book and felt cheated by it. A book, at the centre of which is a daring move to get rid of the power the rolling of dice played in Chaturanga and thereby granting freedom to think, feel and move, doesn’t need the imposition of a note that tells its readers what should be read in it. The story is wonderful, told masterfully by a writer who knows his craft well. I don’t want to believe that the note, in some way, reflects the author’s doubt that without this clarification the story would fail to do the job it has been asked to. Why such doubt, such indecision?

This is Kaul’s second book. His first, A Dream of Horses and Other Stories (2014) is recommended by J.M. Coetzee who notes that “… dreamlike setting, the fastidious melancholy sensibility of their no-longer–young narrators, lead us directly into the territory of late modernism of Borges and Beckett and Nabokov.” A very high praise form a Nobel Laureate, reproduced deservedly on the back cover of The Queen’s Play.

Once the game is invented Mandodari invites the king to play and they play more than once. Often the queen wins but she is clever to let the king enjoy a win too. The game is followed by sex. It has to. It is often said that good description of sex scenes demands utmost control. Unfortunately the writing begins to fail and loose control in these passages some of which can easily place the book on the short list for the Bad Sex in Fiction award. Here is one: “At last the vulva surrounds the phallus, engulfs it. Like dark space engulfing matter, like a lake possessing a mountain’s image, like night covering the gloss of the world. Like a wedge his torso locks into her wet angular thighs.”

“Well, less is more Lucrezia,” reminds Robert Browning’s faultless painter. Fortunately Kaul does his best to follow the rule. The language, apart from the passage cited above, is precise and use of metaphors are disciplined and efficient. They add to the tonal quality of the narrative asking to be read and heard aloud.

I read the book twice and I am sure I’ll read it again to enjoy the resonant prose. The book is meant to be reread. Not because the prose is opaque and the plot complicated. No, it isn’t a plot-driven book. The book demands slow reading to appreciate its carefully crafted prose and to think about the ideas it explores deftly.  I hope that this book is able to find the empathetic reader it has been written for.
 
 
SUBHASH JAIRETH was born in India. He spent nine years in Moscow and moved to Canberra in 1986. He has published poetry, fiction and nonfiction in Hindi, Russian and English. His book To Silence: Three Autobiographies was published in 2011. Two plays adapted from the book were performed at Canberra’s Street Theatre in 2012. His novel After Love was released last year.

Letter to Pessoa

by Michelle Cahill

ISBN 978-1-925336-14-6

Giramondo

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET

Letter to Pessoa fuses prose, poetry, and literary criticism, and is a hymn to the Republic of Letters. Michelle Cahill’s stories are set in multiple locations: Kenya where she was born; London and Australia where she grew up and now lives, respectively; India which is her family’s country of origin; but also Europe, Latin America, and the USA. As a writer, reader, and fellow traveler, she revisits through the power of fiction the literary canon and authors such as Lorca, Borges, Woolf, or Derrida. Like the South Asian-American character Gogol, in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Cahill’s description as Indian-Australian as referenced on the Giramondo book cover, seems to be a misnomer. The sophistication of the collection’s display of a painting by Madeleine Kelly entitled Treatment for Hysteria is unusual of self-proclaimed Asian Australian literary works, whose cover often betrays the cultural provenance of their author by assimilating the latter to an archetypal Orient. Cahill uses the unmarkedness of the Western referent to develop universal themes linking hysteria (from Greek hustera meaning ‘womb’) to femininity, artistic creativity, and the pleasures of Eros.

Many stories in this collection deal with the subject of erotic relationships, although they are not all pleasurable. Inspired by the teachings of Buddhism, Cahill shows lust to be the cause of much of our suffering as human beings, drawn as it is by an illusory desire for completion. Yet at the same time, this is an illusion worth falling for and pursuing, like writing and reading. Lovers’ words and word lovers are treacherous, as Sartre realised when he published Les Mots, and as his complicated relationship with De Beauvoir attested. In post-structuralist fashion, for Cahill’s characters commitments of various kinds (religious, philosophical, political, amorous, humanitarian, filial or otherwise) are always-already fragmentary, postponed, and proxy-like, if only because of the self-referential, relative, and contingent nature of our identities. The part of self-control or randomness in the detours, distractions, and choices we face both as conscientious and conscious agents leave us stranded, exhausted, even suicidal. With an existentialist nausea, tempered by the difficulties of the writing life, Cahill’s characters long for spiritual detachment and freedom while remaining faithful to their elusive quest for meaning, as in ‘Letter to Tadeusz Rózewicz’: ‘Is it unassailable as death then, this fate of being a slave to signification? And who determines it? How did this happen? I am shattered and vaguely nauseous.’ (230)

Uncertainty is true of the human condition in general but is characteristic of the writing process in particular. Repetitions, draftings, effacements, are part and parcel of a ‘medium — language—’ which, unlike other forms of artistic expression such as painting or music, intrinsically involves precision of meaning.’ (Haskell) This is one reason, I believe, why Cahill used the letter form in her collection. Her fetishistic epistles to various totemic figures of the writing scene — Nabokov, Hemingway, Genet, Conrad, and many others — interpellate the reader with a directness that is as intimate as it is disquieting, for it inscribes the insignias of difference, absence, and death in the very place of the addressee. In some passages, Cahill lays bare the fallacy of first/third-person narratives, for ‘accordingly, this author, this narrator, this third person, is other than me entirely.’ (Cahill 40) One always writes for an idealised Cause or Other, if only for one’s projected, fictional selves, in the manner of ‘internal monologues.’ (Cahill, 60) Through the dreaming of reality, the origin, sex, or trace of an author’s haunting presence within the text matters little. With Barthesean sensibility, Cahill thoroughly deconstructs the artificial distinction between author and narrator/narration, since epistolary exchange always-already involves a double address, to the Self as to the Other; writing under erasure, thus.

Cahill’s collection further posits the impossibility of the presence of the body in writing, other than as an object of fantasy which must be distinct from its author. The body has its own logic, will, and language that cannot be captured in words, unless as prosody. Language’s failure to enshrine presence is where poetry starts: ‘Language is fundamentally abstract (unlike movement, colour and line) but literature uses the rhythms, sound patterns and textures of language to overcome that abstractness and capture something of the sensory qualities of experience.’ (Haskell) We can speak of the material and visual resonances that certain choices of words and assemblages Cahill’s aesthetics will not fail to elicit on the reader. Some metronomic cadence or ‘meretricious rhyme’ (60), such as the ‘automatic’ (Cahill 20) nature of physical pleasure or the ‘mechanical’ (21) to and fro of heart valves heard reverberating inside the head on sleepless, feverish, lonely nights, prove to be a source of pain while other, more soothingly ‘joyful repetitions’ (34) are found in the ostinato of a tenor saxophone (33) or in ‘tabla rhythms.’ (91)

For Cahill, writing, too, can be both a painstaking and indispensable activity. At times, her personas write to be loved or to be heard (‘words are all we have — they speak to us and we echo back’ (61). At others it is either the deeply ethical nature or the amoralism of writing; the way writers are ‘smugglers of the imagination,’ (232) which petty criminals such as the drug dealer in  ‘Letter to Jean Genet’ find attractive. Most of the time, though, writing consists in a form of hallucinated daydream in which the Self is allowed temporary escape from pressing commitments (professional, marital, motherly or otherwise) as well as from the humdrum and agitation of modern city life, as in Cahill’s story ‘The Lucid Krishna.’ Her literary creations seem like playful recreations, as in ‘Letter to John Cotetzee.’ Melanie Isaacs, the marginal, silenced woman of colour and university professor David Lurie’s illicit, secret student lover in Coetzee’s Disgrace is given the possibility of a ‘write back’ in the manner of Susan Barton’s letters in Foe, Coetzee’s adaptation of Defoe’s classic Robinson Crusoe. Can we see in Melanie an avatar of Cahill’s own multiple personifications? Who is this voyeuristic eye/I addressing us as readers from the footnotes of history? As Cahill argues in the author’s note, ‘The letter form…creates a double address and a double narrative between two subjects, reader and author. In this way it can question the status of identities.’

Following Cahill, equally questionable is the status of the literary critic or ‘re-viewer’ as a cover-up for the belated gap which writing as immanence irreducibly inscribes. The commanding ‘you’ form may seek to destroy the illusion of the critic as an objective intermediary or neutral arbiter between author and reader. The letter form, besides, encourages such an intersubjective intimacy while at the same time situating the object of criticism in a slippery realm which, as soon we seek to grasp it, evades us. This is a similar ‘skittishness’ (Cahill 240) which Cahill’s characters, as outsiders, feel — their outsider status not always the product of actual marginalia (in fact, quite a few of them come from a privileged, middle-class background) as it is the manifest expression of an inner struggle for authenticity. As the ‘spirit’ of Cahill writes in her last envoi in ‘A Miko Coda’: ‘If you are passing through me for the first time please enjoy my characters, disguises, sabotages and micro-prose.’ (241-2)

As a reader I appreciate the sincerity, the insecurity, and subtlety of Cahill’s hypertextual montages, Purloined Letters, and Post Cards. I would like to address Cahill just as she addresses me ‘as subject, as author of my own desires, anxieties and caprices.’ (56) It was Derrida, without whom Cahill’s narrator is ‘powerless’ (41), who once declared or wrote that he’d never considered himself to be a philosopher or a critic but rather a careful and patient (re)reader; likewise, that deconstruction is not a school or theory but a methodology and practice. I remember Derrida also retorting in a YouTube video that he wasn’t interested in l’amour (love); or did the interviewer mean la mort (death)? La petite mort is a metaphor for orgasm, which in French translates into jouissance, another word for bliss. Cahill is aware of both the magnitudinal intricacies of language’s future anteriority, (as in ‘Borges and I,’ the story of a resuscitated scientist), and of the rejuvenating potential of love, as of death.

In this age of digital and smartphone romance, amateurish stardom, pathological narcissism, and the proliferation of empty signifiers in the form of social medias such as Twitter or Facebook, the lead story ‘Duende,’ which won the 2014 Hilary Mantel International Short Story Award, struck a chord with me. This has eventually little to do with its tragic ending, I believe. Rather, it must be the character Julio’s antiquated yet genuine understanding on seeing the killing of a bull at a corrida in Seville, of the practice of art and poetry in particular as akin to what Artaud called a Theatre of Cruelty: ‘There’s a café by the river bank in Arenal where he orders wine and starts to write. For the first time in months the poems bleed. They spill from his pen to the paper almost monotonously.’ (Cahill 51) As his soon-to-be ex-boyfriend Miguel also feels, ‘There’s a mutilation to art which can’t be named.’ (Cahill 53)

Writing involves sacrifices. This, Hemingway understood, as Cahill does. I do not have in mind the refugee crisis in ‘Sleep Has No Home’ or the Christmas Island disaster which she exposes so tragically in ‘A Wall of Water.’ As its title suggests, these are distant nightmares, although they ought not to be. Neither do I allude to her tackling of the subject of libidinous desire in ‘To Show A Little Hustle’ or ‘Chasing Nabokov.’ These are necessary engagements, especially in the field of self-identified Asian Australian women’s writing where the erotic often remains a non-issue or a commodity, and Cahill addresses them with elegance, insight and cleverness.

What I mean instead are the ‘tortured souls’ in ‘Letter to Tadeusz Rózewicz’ (Cahill 224) and the ‘apocryphal realms’ of ‘Borges and I’ (133) which, following historical precedents and political oppressions, may be invented by the minority writer for their own sanity, stranded as they are in a hostile material reality, with personal failures and industry hurdles to the letters being issued. There is an irony in this. Cahill knows perfectly well that her letters might remain forever unanswered; that they must stop somewhere, at some point, for ‘the book to find its destination’ (236) into the collective mainstream of a readers’ consciousness; though that may never be, for a book’s message, particularly as a short story collection, is bound to be fragmented, like two lovers parting or like a divorced couple. And yet it is the aesthetic of the fragment that most concerns the minority writer. Cahill’s anguish in ‘Letter to Tadeusz Rózewicz’ to unburden herself from the writing process, to be free of writing, makes of the text, a reader, interpreting the figurative voices, compiling all the fragments: ‘I am not the writer, it is Mochizuki that I see.’ she plangently confesses in ‘A Miko Coda.” (Cahill 240)

There is an intentional ambivalence to this text-author, text-critic correlation. It can appear at times like the relationship between patient and psychoanalyst; the latter not really there, a silent listener. Can this delayed conversation however, be more accurate and the only material available in this age of immediacy, the Internet? And does Cahill use the handmade flow of a pen and paper or the dictates of a computer machine to compose her Letter?

While these interrogations may be none of her concern, they are part of my own thread of thoughts as a devoted reader. Letter to Pessoa trembles under the structure of dialogic, incandescent narratives. It is a profound, subtle and important collection; one deserving of a deep appreciation through reading, and (re)reading.

WORKS CITED

Haskell, Dennis. “Seeing Eye to I: The Power of Asian Literatures.” Asialink, 01 Dec 2010.

<http://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/asialink-dialogues-and-applied-research/commentary-and-analysis/seeing-eye-to-i-the-power-of-asian-literatures>

PAUL GIFFARD-FORET obtained his PhD in Anglophone postcolonial literatures from Monash University in Australia. He works as a sessional lecturer in English at La Sorbonne University, Paris. He is involved in political activism and a member of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA).

Black Rock, White City

by A.S. Patric

Transit Lounge

ISBN 9781921924835

Reviewed by NICOLE THOMAS

The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ fuelled fierce debate during the 1990’s when it was applied to atrocities being committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  The euphemism for genocide was coined by perpetrators and adopted by journalists and politicians, penetrating official language.  The definition of ‘ethnic cleansing’ remains a scrutinised topic. Defined by intent, genocide is a punishable crime that signifies mass murder while the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ remains undefined and denotes a lesser degree of harm.  Blum et al. believe the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ “corrupts observation, interpretation, [and] ethical judgement”.

Black Rock White City  follows poet Jovan and his wife Suzana, exiles of Sarajevo, as they struggle to find purpose in their life in suburban Melbourne.  They survive in a displaced reality, in an emotionless afterlife punctuated by a war that claimed the lives of their two children.  The displaced poetry of Jovan’s past emerges when he is forced to remove cryptic messages embedded in graffiti from the bayside hospital where he is employed as a cleaner.  As Dr. Graffito’s destructive acts become increasingly violent, Jovan is forced to confront the trauma of his past.

Set in a hospital, the novel comprises an arrangement of euphemistic expressions, exhibiting the obscurity of figurative language to convey distinct meaning.  The title, born from Melbourne suburb Black Rock and Belgrade’s literal translation to White City, takes the form of equivocation.  The title’s contrasting colours, black and white, indicate a clear distinction between right and wrong doing—evil and virtue.  Patric’s discourse leaves no rock unturned and solicits with bone chilling intelligence an examination of ethical judgement and decision making; an agenda intended for a distinct recognition between the terms ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide.

The destruction begins with a message, The / Trojan / Flea, written on the hospital X-Ray screen.  Accumulating throughout the narrative is an assemblage of visual implements analogous to seeing and not seeing which stimulates an effect of clarity or obscurity.  Words are engraved into optometry lenses, eye charts are altered with messages of graffiti, blurred reflections viewed through glass. The X-Ray screen acts as an object of awareness, prompting closer observation of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ in relation to genocide.  Reference to the Trojan can be seen as a parable to the subterfuge the Greeks used to win the Trojan war, conveying by comparison the implications of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ which as a result of judicial interpretation excused perpetrators of war from legal consequence for atrocities which would otherwise be punishable in international law under the crime of genocide—by default making the perpetrators victorious.  “Fleas on the Trojan Horse.  Who knows what he actually meant?” (230).  “Flea” is one of many words that comprise examples of word ambiguity.  In this instance the character’s own interpretation offers an example of how meaning can evolve from common acceptance of a term, similarly in the way ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide are interpreted generically albeit far removed in meaning.  Later in the narrative, Jovan comes upon stencil markings of dead bodies on the hospital floor and Dr. Graffito’s titled message “ethical cleansing”(200). Patric’s word evolution from ‘ethnic’ to ‘ethical’ supports an review of justice in relation to perpetrators of war and the ethical responsibility for genocide.  

Patric’s main characters, Jovan and Suzana, exist without expression, rejecting language and communication in their struggle to survive displacement.  In the afterlife of war, words written and spoken are as mute as the unspeakable deaths of their children, “Their names were Dejan and Ana.  And there’s nothing more that can be said about the dead that doesn’t make them small, lost and forgotten” (51).  The significance of rejecting words denies the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ as a euphemism to communicate acts of genocide. In contrast to the characters rejection of words, Patric has focused on communicating the senses both in content and form, with acute awareness of sight, sound, and language expression.  Patric punctuates expressions to emphasise force of meaning, “A finger tapping him on the chest any time Jovan looked as if he might rise from his seat.  Not as a threat, as punctuation for the story Mitrovich was telling…” (203). Punctuation too, is expressed by representation of exact words in their basic sense, which works to disambiguate meaning, “’A question for you,’ Jovan says loudly, placing a full stop into the doctor’s mouth” (44).  This literal language—in contrast to symbolic marks of punctuation—is in a sense, another way of demonstrating the disambiguation of meaning.  Patric’s literal translation of punctuation is seamlessly executed at the close of Chapter Two when the spotlight of focus is on the hospital Optometrist waiting at the station for a train.

“There has been a notion on many such occasions. It has always been a small idea barely the size of a full stop in whatever she was reading.  She’s read that famous book by Tolstoy and remembers the images of a flame being blown out and a book being closed.  But it’s not as easy as that.  Or poetic.  It is more like a pig hung from its rear legs and getting its throat cut.  It is a mutilation the splintering bones of her skeleton had never prepared for.  It is a demolition of her soul her imagination could never have conceived.  There is no book to close. There is no candle.  Such absurdly poetic images for the pages of a story.

When Miss Richards leaps off the platform at Hallam, she hits the shiny, clean, steel rails and breaks bones in her wrists and knees, and then the impact of the train shatters everything else, and tears her meat into bits, and spatters her blood across the hot dry rocks of Hallam station.” (53-54)  

The scene at Hallam station ignites the senses.  The shock of Miss Richards leap is a visceral sensation that plunges the reader into a punctuated vertical drop; the leap acting as a terminal line of exclamation above the “full stop”.  Patric’s discourse is both figurative and literal and offers a collision of realities.  The trauma of Miss Richards body hitting the rails and the impact of the train emphasises clarity and aids any uncertainty of meaning: In a sense the reader confronts the trauma head-on.  The impact of pain and coming apart is contrast to a flickering image of death analogous to the scene from Anna Karenina, that expresses a metaphorical image that fails to convey the reality of death.  The significance highlights the obscurity of figurative language to convey distinct meaning.

The narrative juxtaposes Jovan’s poetry and messages of graffiti to emphasise the disparity between forms of expression and interpreted meaning.  

A river of Waste
Just below Your skin
your Bones rot in
history’s flowing shit

The poetry of Jovan’s past dislodges as it collides with the messages embedded in the graffiti, forcing Jovan to relive scenes from the war on Bosnia.  Jovan’s recollections derive from actual news broadcasts of NATO’s air strikes on Belgrade in 1999. Patric’s use of discourse from real events imposes reflection and perspective, enforcing a way of understanding yet being far removed in experience from the reality of war; it’s a way of necessitating rememberance of events so the memory does not forget.

“Do not visualise the details. Do not try to imagine what husband and wife may, or may not, have thought or felt.  As those images on television broadcasts could not fully penetrate the minds of Suzana and Jovan, or anyone watching anywhere else at the time, so no one will ever know anything of this experience… It can only excite brief feelings, the the way something might from a film, one of Jovan’s books, or the poetry that he used to put to paper…” (141-142)

The medical community and Jovan’s occupation as hospital janitor in this novel are details that spotlight attention on the delusion that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is as a measure for public health, the cleansing of a society or race, a euphemism that Blum et al. believe “bleaches the atrocities of genocide” (204).  Dr. Graffito’s destructive acts turn to obliteration when a woman is found inside the hospital drowned in a bleach bath, and what emerges will leave no reader in two minds of this novels intent. Black Rock White City takes issue with war, examining the ethics of justice and crime in the case of Bosnia. It explores immigrant displacement and refugee experience, interrogating the nature of language to reveal how interpretive meaning can trivialise the realities and atrocities of war, impeding justice.

Notes

Blum, Rony, et al. “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Bleaches the Atrocities of Genocide †.” European Journal of Public Health 18.2: 204-09. Print.

Singleterry, Douglas. “”Ethnic Cleansing” and Genocidal Intent: A Failure of Judicial Interpretation?” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5.1 (2010): 39-67. Print.

Sirkin, Micol. “Expanding the Crime of Genocide to Include Ethnic Cleansing: A Return to Established Principles in Light of Contemporary Interpretations.” Seattle University Law Review 33.2: 489-526. Print.

NICOLE THOMAS lives on the South Coast of NSW.  She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts with Distinction from the University of Wollongong, and was awarded The UoW Centre for Canadian Australian Studies (CCAS) Award.  Nicole is currently working on her memoir.

Paths of Flight

by Luke Fischer

Black Pepper Press

ISBN 9781876044855

Reviewed by ROBBIE COBURN
 
 
 

The philosophical subject of Luke Fischer’s poetics aligned with his astounding use of language and form create a poetry born of beauty and existential exploration. In Paths of Flight, his debut collection, the natural world and the internalized world of the poet collide and create a space beyond both.

Often, when a poet intends to create the perfect poem technically and structurally, the emotional drive that stimulates the reader can become quickly buried beneath the words, and the balance between quality writing and emotional honesty is undoubtedly a difficult one. Fischer himself ‘regards poetry as a mediation and articulation of truth’, and this book embodies this while still standing as a technically impressive body of work.

Fischer’s work has appeared in various places and has been appropriately acknowledged for its beauty and skill, but to categorize this as a “first collection” seems impossible. The poems demonstrate assurance, control, balance and precision, without becoming forced at any time. One of the most interesting aspects of Fischer’s poetry is the approach and careful execution of the work. A highly-regarded scholar, his work is deeply rooted in philosophy, with a focus on the work of Rilke.

‘I follow the fluent sequences’, a line quoted on the back cover of the book, indeed evokes the sequence of both living and poetry, seamlessly tied to the flight of birds as the poet watches two black birds ‘arcing more smoothly than figure skaters’. The startling imagery, which is characteristic of Paths of Flight, is deployed with immense subtlety and control, while detail is used as a device that evokes complexity and depth, such as in ‘Aristocratic Party’:

Stepping back
I notice in one corner
a hem of brittle lace
not quite hiding
mahogany legs

Fischer’s poems notice aspects both prominent and hidden within the natural and the internal. There are a great many forms taken on, though the imagery that characterizes Fischer’s poetry has a way of pervading his oeuvre. The presence of birds, as the title suggests, is a recurring feature. Much like the work of Robert Adamson, Fischer views the bird as an intelligent, endlessly beautiful creature, despite acknowledging its capacity for violence out of necessity and survival.

Sometimes the bird is a vehicle for metaphor, or could describe an emotion, an experience or a landscape, such as in ‘Swift’:

Hawkish face and eyes,
pared to necessity;
brow,
planed by supernal winds,
arrow-head;
body,
compact,
feathered-bullet;

The image of a ‘feathered-bullet’ to describe a bird is a breathtaking example of the way Fischer uses the man-made world to explore the subjectivity of birds, with ‘pared to necessity’ describing the bird in flight, doing as it must beneath the drive of nature.

Birds and landscapes are, also, often linked to history and mythology, demonstrating the immense knowledge possessed by the poet and his skilful ability to use it as a device in his work.

The excellent ‘Everything is water’, the title of which is itself a quote from the Pre-Socratic philosopher,Thales, uses nature as a metaphor for the body, while creating a history of understanding the ways in which the body operates in the natural world as ‘a system of currents/wrapped around the body/and limbs of a goddess/defying gravity’. This serves as a meditation on evolution and discovery in the ancient world, and contains some of Fischer’s most beautiful lines

They must have learned from water
and with fluent strokes
imparted their knowledge to marble
until the river itself stood up
and walked

Some of the poems that rely less on imagery are equally as powerful. These poems flow with sincerity and honesty, the seasons and landscape almost always still entering the poems minimally. In ‘Reverie’, the poet reflects on a simple moment of peace and clarity, sitting beside what appears to be a partner, watching the sun, celebrating the beauty of this moment and the solace it provides:

After a long winter,
imitating the lizards on their stones
we rest on benches strewn along the river
with our faces turned to the sun; closing our eyes
we dream of golden palaces forged by Hephaestus.

One of the finest poems in this collection, written from the point of view of a hermit in the 15th century, is so precise and haunting, so free of any excess, that it leaves the reader startled. Fischer writes starkly, brilliantly affirming his speaker ‘when the inner sun/dawned my mind turned/into the glittering face of the sea’. This is a moving, somewhat troubling piece, as the hermit contemplates the fact that his diary may never be read and his words may never be heard as he ‘[speaks] and does not speak’:

Even as I write
my pen
erases

(“Transcription from the first page of a hermit’s diary (c. 1500)”

A stunning achievement within a book of many, the poetry of Luke Fischer is unquestionably diverse and unique. It is testament to his range, skill and depth that he can evoke and marry the natural landscape with the internal landscape, while also exploring many states of mind, and aspects of what it means to be human. Intelligent and filled with a deep sense of humanity, Paths of Flight shows us there is as much need to look into the sky for meaning as there is to simply look into the sky for beauty.

ROBBIE COBURN is a Melbourne-based poet. His second full-length The Other Flesh is due out in early 2017.

Year of the Wasp

by Joel Deane

Hunter Publishing

ISBN: 9780994352859

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

A stroke is among the most disconcerting and disabling afflictions we humans are likely to encounter. Joel Deane, poet, speechwriter, novelist, had one in 2012 and Year of the Wasp is his three-part, book-length poem recounting that event and his recovery from it.

Although there are details of the wards, the nurses etc Deane has preferred to find “objective correlatives” for his suffering and so has, in effect, mythologised the experience. The mythology he uses is mainly classical but some allusions range more widely.   While such a decision can frustrate the reader’s desire for medical and rehabilitative detail, it also generates a forward momentum so that the poem threatens almost to break free of the author’s control. Given that lack of control is the defining feature of a stroke, Deane’s strategy is not inappropriate.

The metaphorical energy employed in Year of the Wasp also reminds one of Luke Davies’ long poem, “Totem”, though that was essentially a love poem and this one is about pain (though love does intrude). A willingness to forgo literal coherence in favour of metaphorical intensity also goes back to the American poet, Hart Crane (1899-1933) in his “Voyages” and “The Bridge” sequences. It’s a fine, sometimes risk-taking, tradition.

Deane starts the title sequence clearly enough — and with a distinctly country-Victoria atmosphere: “South of Shepp / the Renault punched a hole / the shape of the first man / in a storm of locusts. / Confirming the irrigation flats / as God’s chosen wasteland.” It’s a characteristic mixture that continues through the rest of the book. The event (the stroke, though we are not told that at first) takes place south of “Shepp(arton)” but already we are in the Old Testament with locust plagues and a looming Jehovah. Later the gods will be classical, rather than the Jewish one, but we know the terrain we find ourselves in.

Another instance of Deane’s mythologising can be seen at the beginning of the very next poem. “It was foolish to hope. He prayed / for rain but the heavens let fall / Tithonus instead, / whose every atom / was transfigured into a wasp.” Here we have a straight statement of the poet’s initial helplessness — and then a reference to the Greek mythological figure, Tithonus, whose divine lover, Eos, asked Zeus to bestow immortality on him but forgot to ask for youth as well. Thus, according to some versions, Tithonus was transformed into a ancient cicada who calls out eternally, begging for death. The analogy to a stroke victim’s situation is more than apposite.

The wasp at the end of this excerpt symbolises the debilitating effects of the stroke throughout the book and, to a lesser extent, the sheer senselessness of strokes. It’s not as if anyone “deserves” one. It’s like being struck down by one of those arbitrary gods who had nothing better to do on the day. At times the wasps are particularly vindictive: “ a wasp performs a pig Latin liturgy / on the tabernacle / that is his tongue.” And we know how important the tongue is to a poet.

The distancing provided by the intermittent third person viewpoint seen here is also part of the poem’s overall effect. It contributes to the “objective” part of the “objective correlative”. And helps to avoid any self-pity.

A further contributor to the work’s overall tone is Deane’s use of literary allusions. His dog, apparently, is called “Caligula”, Robert Lowell’s schoolboy nickname, and so provokes a quotation from Lowell’s poem, “Skunk Hour” : “My mind’s not right.” Earlier on, a “black swan / of a woman” (his Somali nurse?) reminds the poet of Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole”. Both allusions are lightly made but they also help to connect the poem with the mainstream of poetry in English. Year of the Wasp is not at all a “confessional” poem about someone’s reversal of fortune.

A lot of the poems here are short, free-standing ones which contribute only obliquely to the whole while serving to ramify and widen the work’s overall intent. A fine example is seen in the opening four lines of a section which begins: “The way the setting sun shadows / a stand of pines that had no right / to colonise the river bank, / but did and do and shall remain”.

It’s also a foreshadowing of the more explicit political elements in the book’s final section, particularly the longer poem which begins: “Let us talk of Knoxville, Tennessee” and which goes on to intone lines like the following: “Let us and our children and our children’s children / not be burned to the bone. / Let us talk of the sorrow of being. / Let us waterboard General le May until he explains / how a killer is a hero is a father is a son.” Australia, too, does not escape: “Let us argue / at the Hague that the prisoners on Manus Island / are not people but haunted boku-zukin — / and that what is hidden beneath those hoods / is no longer human. “

Some readers may feel that, in these moral/political reflections,  Deane has drifted somewhat from his first preoccupation with stroke and recovery. The poet’s response would probably be that the intensity of his suffering has forced him to look beyond himself and to now see his experience in a wider context. The stroke has not diminished his previous moral concerns; rather it has intensified them.

These concerns also lend pressure to the book’s final poem which begins: “There are no happy endings. / There is no life eternal. / There is only grace ephemeral.”. The poem goes on to remember “the years and months, days and hours / of that great unhappiness … “ Deane insists he “will not beg the Fates / for mercy, / for one day more than is my due.” There’s also a passing, and perhaps belated, tribute to the poet’s wife who has been seeing him through all this.  “… and — / should tomorrow come / … give me the love I have loved / all my adult days / so that I might watch her clockwise / track the diurnal passage of the chariot / of the sun … / For though we have no time to live, /we have just enough time to love.”

As it was in the beginning, so it is at the end. One minute the poet is asking: “Remember Box Hill Hospital?” The next he’s talking about “the chariot / of the sun”. It’s been a heady combination of the literal and the mythological throughout. If some readers become momentarily lost along the way, the experience of reading Year of the Wasp is likely nevertheless to stay with them. It’ll be some time before they forget the impact of lines such as: “And on the third day / a seagull with ants for eyes / found him half-buried / in winter sand, and wearing / a surgical gown and a hospital bracelet / on a stranger’s wrist.”

Year of the Wasp is a brave book, packed with metaphorical energy, and repays multiple readings.

GEOFF PAGE is a Canberra based poet and critic. He edited Best Australian Poems 2015 and his latest collection is Plevna, a verse biography, (UWA).

Devadatta’s Poems

by Judith Beveridge

Giramondo Publishing

ISBN 978-1-922146-52-6

Reviewed by STU HATTON

According to the collection of Buddhist scriptures known as the Pāli Canon, Devadatta was a first cousin of the Buddha. Devadatta created a schism within the Sangha (the Buddha’s order), and tried to murder the Buddha on several occasions. In her introduction to Devadatta’s Poems, Judith Beveridge writes:

Some commentators say that Devadatta was the brother of Yasodhara, Siddhattha’s [i.e. the Buddha’s] wife, but I have also read that Devadatta was a suitor to Yasodhara, but he failed to win her hand in a test of arms, and that part of Devadatta’s animosity towards the Buddha was based on jealousy (p. 3).

Beveridge takes the latter version of the tale and runs with it, casting Devadatta as the speaker/poet in a book-length sequence of 48 monologues that she is quick to label as ‘highly fictionalised and dramatised’ (Introduction, p. 3; Beveridge’s emphasis). Here it’s worth noting Buddhist scholar and teacher Reginald Ray’s contention that ‘within the Indian Buddhist corpus’, portrayals of Devadatta are ‘not entirely consistent’, ranging from his being synonymous with evil, to being a saint praised by the Buddha himself (Ray, p. 162). Although Ray’s argument has been criticised in some quarters (see, for example, Bhikkhu Sujato), nevertheless as a mytho-historical figure, Devadatta’s status is unresolved to a certain extent, and this can be seen to offer Beveridge considerable licence.

The book’s title attributes the poems to Devadatta, but of course this is still very much a collection of Judith Beveridge poems. Had it been published anonymously, it would surely have been obvious to dedicated readers of her poetry that this was a Beveridge collection, partly due to hallmarks of style and form. The Buddhist subject matter would also have been a significant clue, since this is not the first time she has traversed this territory. Her 1996 collection Accidental Grace has a short sequence entitled ‘The Buddha Cycle’; and Wolf Notes (2003) includes ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’, a longer sequence in which Siddhattha is cast as the ‘I’, tracing the time from when he adopts a mendicant life, up until he is about to attain enlightenment.

Devadatta’s poems tend towards a formal neatness: most have a set number of lines per stanza, and some of the shapelier stanzas use indents with regular patterns. There are a number of variations on the pantoum—whereas ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’ offered variations on the stricter, more exacting villanelle. Repetition, simile, alliteration, assonance and rhyme are key linguistic components of the Pāli Canon (see Bhikkhu Anālayo), and all feature in Devadatta’s Poems. Alliteration and assonance are pushed to the limit in ‘Ground Swell’ (p. 8), in phrasings such as ‘the swippling swishes of fly-maddened flails’. Rhyme is employed occasionally, in poems such as ‘In Rajagaha’ (p. 28) and ‘Nightmare’ (p. 44). The concluding rhymes of ‘trash’/‘panache’/‘hash’ in ‘The Hermit’ (p. 48) examplify the humour that invigorates much of the collection.

Repetition comes to the fore in ‘Tailspin’ (p. 19), where practically every word or phrase is repeated at least once. The repetitions convey Devadatta’s obsession with Yasodhara (‘I want to say my prayers / and mantras, but I smell her hair, her scent of jasmine’). We also hear of his struggles with bodily aches (often the bane of the meditator). Devadatta says, ‘I find it hard to have / self-discipline’ and ‘I find it hard / to gain self-discipline’ [Emphasis mine]. It’s as if self-discipline might be ‘had’ like a coveted other, or bought, or hoarded like wealth; he doesn’t say he finds discipline hard to develop or cultivate.

Beveridge’s poetry, though, is aligned with an avowed practice of cultivation. She pursues a hard-won poetry of the ‘finished article’, of the ‘exact phrase’. But such a poetry, when paired with formal niceties, arguably sits a little awkwardly with the disposition and voice of Beveridge’s Devadatta. But perhaps his poetry can be seen as a cathartic outlet, with the formal, ordering processes undertaken therein constituting a mode of sublimation. On the other hand, Devadatta doesn’t seem to embody the kind of discipline needed to produce a ‘hard-won’ poem, and he is certainly not ‘the finished article’. But he doesn’t feel the Buddha fits the latter description either—and this scepticism regarding the Buddha’s attainment, teachings and methods makes for some pointed, scathing or even scandalous poems where much of the collection’s drama emerges.

In ‘The Buddha at Uruvela’ (p. 26) the Buddha is addressing a crowd, and Devadatta wonders to himself: ‘Can’t they see Buddha speaks from the privilege / of a high-borne, well heeled past?’. Devadatta continues: ‘Don’t these / / folk know what shackles them to suffering / is not desire, as the Buddha exposits, but the hard-set, / iron-fisted system of caste.’ Note the full stop after ‘caste’, where one might have expected a question mark. It’s as if Devadatta, being some kind of proto-Marxist, couldn’t bear to see a question mark following what he perhaps sees as a statement of fact.

It’s difficult to deny the importance of caste to the Buddha’s life; indeed, he can be seen as a radical of his time because he allowed members of any caste to join his order. He went against the ideological grain by pointing out that caste, in and of itself, was not an index of one’s spiritual birthright, or one’s potential for awakening. And while Devadatta is right to raise questions of caste and ideology, he seems to put the cart before the horse by nominating the caste system, rather than desire, as the ultimate source of suffering. For what is the caste system if not a programmatic structure to serve the desires of the few at the expense of the desires of the many? From a Buddhist perspective, it might be said that the caste system arises out of craving and aversion (i.e. the two sides of the coin of desire), as well as delusions associated with essentialistic separations between ‘self’ and ‘other’.

Beveridge eschews any claims Devadatta might have to saintliness, and makes no mention of his demand that monastics be more rigorously ascetic than required by the Buddha. As recounted in the Pāli Canon, this demand was, on one level, a ruse employed to create a schism; but it might also be seen as heartfelt. Beveridge has admitted that, compared to his canonical counterpart, her Devadatta is ‘much more lascivious and pleasure seeking’ (p. 3). He is marked as obsessive, covetous, bitter, vengeful, conniving. He’s a gambler, a drinker of wine and koumis, a smoker of hash. He craves delicious food, sexual pleasures, a carnival; if not luxury then certainly not the ‘poverty and slim pickings’ he ascribes to the monk’s lot (p. 15). He lets ‘desire have its ground’ (‘Vultures Peak’, p. 29). All of this flies in the face of the Buddha’s prescriptions for overcoming suffering and attaining enlightenment.

As a kind of nemesis or anti-Buddha figure, it seems appropriate that Devadatta’s cravings and attachments come to nothing. His scheming is ineffectual, and his attempts on the Buddha’s life are botched. In ‘Rocks, Vultures Peak’ (p. 52), Devadatta dislodges a sizeable rock from on high as the Buddha passes below; but the Buddha is ‘barely injured. A cut on his toe.’ Devadatta is at a distance; there is no direct confrontation as such—and this is true of all three methods he employs in attempting to kill the Buddha. Indeed, in forging his character and voice, Beveridge seems to have honed in on Devadatta’s remoteness. He does get on famously with his partner-in-scheming Ajatasattu, who seems just as grasping as him. But it’s noteworthy that all of Devadatta’s poems involving Yasodhara, and almost all involving Siddhattha are either recollections or (day)dreams. There is no ‘direct’, ‘present’ interaction or dialogue between these key characters. Perhaps if Beveridge had attempted to convey such interactions directly, it would have put too great a strain on the voice of the poems—or else some dramatic vehicle other than Devadatta’s voice may have been required?

It’s as if Devadatta has attained some kind of anti-nirvana of infinite, unfulfilled desires. He seems to be caught in past and future; he’s either stewing over past ‘injustices’, plotting Siddhattha’s downfall, or fantasising about Yasodhara. The ‘now’ only seems to get his attention when it involves sensual desire or disgust. And these are interwoven with imagination: cravings clawing towards an imagined future, aversions tending to draw upon the past (e.g. traumatic experiences).

I found Devadatta’s Poems a more grounded sequence than ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’. Certainly Devadatta’s diction in the former is less elevated than Siddhattha’s in the latter. ‘Between …’ was dedicated to Dorothy Porter, but it is Devadatta’s Poems that calls to mind Akhanaten and the darker soundings of Porter’s verse novels. Devadatta’s Poems gains vitality from its strokes of humour and playfulness; its flights of sound and sensuality in describing Devadatta’s world; its narrative frictions; and its gritty exploration of the all-too-human.

Citations

Beveridge, Judith, Accidental Grace, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996.
Beveridge, Judith, Wolf Notes, Artarmon: Giramondo, 2003.
Bhikkhu Anālayo, ‘Oral Dimensions of Pāli Discourses: Pericopes, other Mnemonic Techniques and the Oral Performance Context’, Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies, Number Three, 2007, Toronto: Nalanda College of Buddhist Studies.
Bhikkhu Sujato, ‘Why Devadatta Was No Saint’, Santipada, 24 Oct 2012, accessed 11 May 2016, <http://santifm.org/santipada/2010/why-devadatta-was-no-saint/>.
Ray, Reginald, Buddhist Saints in India: A Study in Buddhist Values and Orientations, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

STU HATTON is a poet, critic and editor based in Dja Dja Wurrung country. His work has appeared in The Age, Best Australian Poems 2012, Cordite, Overland and elsewhere. He has published two collections: How to be Hungry (2010) and Glitching (2014). Sometimes he posts things at http://outerblog.tumblr.com.

Eidolon

by Sandeep Parmar

Shearsman Books

ISBN 978-1-848613-92-8

Reviewed by NABINA DAS

The reading of Eidolon for me started with the cover art of Sandeep Parmar’s book. The Gustave Moreau painting evokes a sense of mystery and intrigue, as also of solitariness in a ravaged world—emotions that continue to run through the slim volume.

The 50 title-less poems numbered in Roman numerals is a narrative of Helen of Troy’s life then and after, literally. The poetic in this collection embodies artifact or memory, unspoken desire or a snapshot of both past and present.

The classical entity that we know Helen to be, is realized in Parmar’s poetry as a modern identity engaged in acts of everyday ennui or philosophizing about her immediate environs.

Helen
fetching the paper from the front lawn in her dressing gown a lot of the time

But that is only one dimension of this ideating the poet indulges in.

The word “denuded” is not only a reference to the body exposed and ensnared but also one that talks of a self shorn off the grandeur one imagines with the feminine representation of Helen of Troy.

Helen denuded                Helen
a place of palor where
silk shrinks around her throat
exits the office”

“Silk” becomes the marker of a certain bearing, status or pretension. The idea of beauty, finesse, perfection can well choke the body as well the legacy of all bodies  that inhabit a public space in our society.

Eidolon is a compass to memory, a newly annotated reference book to Helen the classical heroine, as well as to the so-called burden of a colonial history that Parmar has seen percolating her own history.

Tippeted old Colonial –
Uncle, his mustard handkerchief
like a standard raised to his lips
asks: ‘If it’s  England vs. India
at the Cricket, where do you stand?’

This deviation from the ‘Helen narrative’ actually helps in understanding it better. The “standard” is a sign of power, one that was used by the British colonial masters. The history of the standard is ancient and one that is mostly associated with power and domination. This is further highlighted by the allusion to an “England vs. India” cricket match which, although less charged than an India-Pakistan face-off as any subcontinental would know, is a matter of great pride being staked on the either side. Divided loyalties is the crux of the matter here. Helen could have supported her own husband or her furtive lover. Either way, she would be doomed because she would have to carry the burden of identity pitted against love and duty. The “mustard” can be seen again as a nationalistic indicator given that saffron or mustard still plays a big role in contemporary politics especially in India, where Parmar’s roots are. Originally seen as a color of sacrifice, this hue acquires a complex meaning in the history of war/s and engaged body that the poet explores.

The narrative structure of Eidolon takes us back and forth through the personal emotions of the individual named Helen, her projected historical aura, as well as through Parmar’s own voice of listlessness. Sometimes, the latter appear to be a longing for locating the self through this designated character of Helen.

Helen                where are you
and where is your shadow       Helen
circling the horse
packed with soldiers
war-weary
taunting them
in the voices
of their wives

Something interesting here is at play other than the call for attention. It’s the “shadow” that supposedly addresses the tired soldiers. The multiple becoming of Helen in this manner is an indication of her being seen by the poet as a unique device for iteration. The men are taunted, for they have wasted time in warring. Parmar’s feminist personae through this shadow-talking is highly evocative. The voices that the shadow mimics is a perfect impersonation to drive home notions of love, repose, longing, and feminist futurism.

Throughout the collection, one may say Parmar’s ‘Hellenic ideal’ through the narrative of Helen is also a call to democracy, justice, and equal rights:

US National Interests. Matters of vital interest to the United States to include national security, public safety, national economic security, the safe and reliable functioning of “critical infrastructure”, and the availability of “key resources”. [PPD (Presidential Policy Directive) 20, Top Secret]

It has of course occurred to me                             that this conversation
            is being recorded                                         but what you say
                        does not anyway                              belong to me (vii)

The all-too well known image of “Uncle Sam/a pitifully silvered Abe Lincoln/his sinewy hands pray” is the flag bearer of a masculinity-riddled civilization that Helen’s imagery seeks to appeal to, requesting sanity in politics and personal life.

In fact, this conglomeration of ideas—the individual and the collective states of mind—could seem to be jostling too close for elbow space. While the gamut of concepts in undoubtedly eclectic, the sparkle ebbs now and then because the reader hops over staccato sentences, jaunty phrases, abrupt transitions and somewhat loosely structured topic switches.

However, this is where the reader also feels that Parmar toys with space and page and we see a lot of long and short sentences, as though history and lore keep vying for focus, At times, the line breaks, lengths and indents seem too frequent. Language in Parmar’s hands is a tool or a trick. Like memory it rambles or prances. At times it diverts one’s interest in the subject matter. There is no denying the fact that at the end Parmar’s craft provokes to gauge through the verses. Eidolon emerges in the reader’s vision as that ‘reincarnation’ that is at once empowered, prophetic, and questioning.

NABINA DAS is a 2015-16 Commonwealth Writers Correspondent, a 2012 Charles Wallace Fellow, and a 2012 Sangam House Lavanya Sankaran Fiction Fellow. She is the author of a short story collection The House of Twining Roses: Stories of the Mapped and the Unmapped and a novel Footprints in the Bajra. Nabina’s debut poetry collection Blue Vessel was cited as one of the best poetry books of 2012 while the most recent volume Into the Migrant City was cited as one of the top 11 poetry reads of 2014. An MFA from Rutgers University, Nabina teaches creative writing to students in universities and workshops. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Schooner; The Yellow Nib: Modern English Poetry by Indians (Queen’s University, Belfast); The Indian Quarterly; Caravan; The Missing Slate; Good Housekeeping, etc. Nabina occasionally blogs at http://nabinadas13.wordpress.com/