Homer
is new, this morning,
and there is perhaps nothing so old as today’s newspaper.
(Charles Péguy – trans.)
and there is perhaps nothing so old as today’s newspaper.
(Charles Péguy – trans.)
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Old
Songs -by
Sharanya Naik
ISBN# - 158909203172 pages, $13.95
Published by eBookstand.com
Midwest Book Review:
Old Songs is a brief collection of twenty-seven free-verse poems plus one prose story that retells an ancient East Indian epic, The Ramayana, through the voice of its heroine. Steeped in East Indian culture and experience, as well as the universal themes of love, the eternal quest to find a person who understands one's soul, and individual wanderings in the physical and spiritual realms. A moving fusion of storytelling, mythos and rhythm. "Lament": So many lost / not to death / to anger, fear / so weak the ground / beneath relationship / so easily swallowed...
Read (below) a review by Kylea Taylor.
–
Beautiful, beautiful poetry. I wanted to read all of it in one sitting, but it took two or three days, because Old Songs is just so rich with love and death and old age and longing, with textures and smells and sights and sounds. Naik writes in the poem Leela:
A poet cannot tell of lovemaking
for there are no words
in those secret spaces
But it is the sweetness of the coming together
that the pen longs to speak of.
And it seemed to me that a theme through all of this collection is the lovemaking between the Larger Story of the myth and archetype and the Smaller Story of the personal life and its human experience. The author reminds us with olfactory image of the "jungle of jasmine" that is the sweetness in the meeting of these two. And she lets us feel the elements in the repellent pain of not-meeting:
As if a great fear had been let out
to darken the heart, a wind arises
swings around the trees
whips the ground into a thousand flying particles
A couple of her poems reminded me of Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, one of my favorite poetry books from childhood, in which each poem is a window into a unique soul. Such poems are Naik’s "Old Woman Dies" or "Fish-Wife," as follows:
I watched, yogurt midway to lips
as she screamed and then, I think
I swallowed her
for she seemed to be shouting from
inside me, from my stomach from my chest
the words seemed to pour
and I knew her -- I had always known her
as myself
And there is a lightness that comes through blunt truth, not before expressed in such a way, which relieves the pathos of some of our tragic mythic characters, making me laugh aloud, as in Oedipus Rant:
Oedipus
ate a puss
the wrong one
And, again, as in the poem Electra:
Why didn’t she simply grab that long blade
gleaming
knife still wet with her father’s blood and
plunge it into her arrogant mother’s heart
Why wait for some younger brother
to return from his travels
Naik writes of both male and female heroes in her poetry, but with the females, she seems to use a necessary extra force, taking up the poet’s lever to pry open mythic truth, to reinsert the lost dimension of woman, partner, mother, daughter, old woman.
The second half of this book is a novella, a retelling of the Indian epic, The Ramayana, in the voice of its heroine, Sita. Sita’s voice has never been heard. It is Naikís leap of imagination which captures the voice of this ancient queen. Her time and place is foreign to the reader, and yet her story is familiar and important. The end of The Ramayana is not often told, since it brings the glory of the epic down to mundane and somewhat sordid human-ness. But Sitaís story really begins and ends there, and is therefore worth hearing all the way through. With Naik’s insistence, Sita shares of her life and love for Rama, and explains the unjust accusation against her (which she will not lower herself to explain to anyone else but us). It is as if she were reading from her diary, written while imprisoned, awaiting her death, because she is so hungry to be understood and believed:
So often we hear men speak of their honor as if it were a sword, thrusting, thirsting, challenging all who dare defy. But for a woman, the word calls up a deep inner pain, a chilling certainty that it is her last deep defense of a secret understanding that she has nothing, is nothing, in the eyes of the people who surround her.
This is a wonderful first book from a gifted writer. Sharanya Naik has equal ability to take her talents forward in the directions of either fiction or poetry.
Kylea Taylor is the editor of The Inner Door, the author of The Breathwork Experience, The Ethics of Caring, The Holotropic Breathwork Workshop Manual and editor of Exploring Holotropic Breathwork. Her first book was Water Marks, a book of poetry published in 1972.
Read a poem published in www.poetsagainstthewar.org
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