Bhatt, Sujata;
Monkey Shadows
Carcanet 1991 / Penguin India 1993, 123 pages
ISBN 0140233334
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.
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–
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 -
[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 ...