Reason to rhyme

From debut poetry that reflects on the worldly and personal, to verse that revisits the horrors of our past, we bring you four collections that we have read recently

Where Stories Gather By Karuna Ezara Parikh

There are very few poets, who speak like, for and of us. Parikh’s verse, we admit, is relatable for many reasons. She covers an entire spectrum of feelings, thoughts and experiences. Like Ratna Pathak Shah, in her blurb for the book, shares: “[The poems] they get under your skin right away, but it’s when you read them again that they burrow deeper.” Hope permeates through her collection as we navigate everything from confession to submission, being a loser, and reflecting and reading about what hurts, and what doesn’t. It’s hard to select a favourite from here, which includes both short and long verse, but Becoming is something we have gone back to every time we wanted a gentle reminder or a nudge to continue.
You are not the sum of people you have loved.
You are not the sum of the once you have tried to,
Nor the ones you didn’t but left your mark upon anyway,
Even in your wakeful, difficult, sizzling cruelty,
You are math more dignified than that.
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Price : Rs 399

Mumblings & Musings By Anirban Bhattacharyya

Bhattacharyya, author of crime non-fiction The Deadly Dozen: India’s Most Notorious Serial Killers and co-creator-producer of Savdhaan India, attempts to explore the poet inside him with his debut collection.  Each of the 44 poems in the book are interspersed with pictures taken by him and photographer Ashish Bakshi. The themes revolve around everyday life and people, cities, nature, faith and the bigotry that continues to pervade our consciousness. The verse is sincere and so are the stories that emerge from them. In The Butcher, he shares:
Loneliness makes its onslaught felt,
The hanging carcass in the butcher’s shop;
Life drains out
With drops of blood and tears;
The glassy stare of the severed head.
While God laughs
Slicing through another piece of you.
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Price : Rs 225

Walk By Mustansir Dalvi

Dalvi’s brave collection Walk, a haunting memory of the plight of migrants during the Coronavirus-induced lockdowns, has been released by Poetrywala with translations in Marathi (Hemant Divate), Gujarati (Udayan Thakker) and Hindi by Dalvi. The verse is powerful and a reminder of the grave chaos spurred by an ill-planned government policy, and how it’s the poor who will always be the first to burn. Dalvi’s skill is his brevity—his verse is terse, but emphatic and painful. It recalls a migration of the worst and most savage kind; here are stories which we’d want to have conveniently erased, but for Dalvi’s poetry—he embalms it for posterity. In Everyone Is Angry, he writes:
Negative is positive. Positive is negative.
We hide by day. We trudge by night.
Trains run backwards. We tramp, tramp, tramp,
In the other direction.
The rich make us sick. The poor go hungry.
Everyone is angry.
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Price : Rs 400

Eunoia By Renata Pavrey

WE chanced upon Pavrey’s debut collection accidentally on Facebook, and out of sheer curiosity, purchased a copy. Reading it, though, has been an utter delight. The collection moves from the personal, offering us a peek into the life of its author, a nutritionist, book lover, dancer and runner, and also the world that she inhabits. It’s also a celebration of poetry, as Pavrey experiments with everything from blank verse, acrostics, Japanese haiku, senryu and tanka, alongside traditional rhymed poetry. All of it comes together beautifully. We, in particular, liked the Haiku from Above:
Stars stitched in the sky
Watching people strewn below
“How many they are!”
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Price : Rs 200

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