The Seduction of Words

Book Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: Meanwhile

Author: Prerna Gill

Publisher: HarperCollins India

There are many places that poetry comes from — desire, death, dream, memory, sharp sensuous apprehension, the wrist-grip of language’s freedom and magic, the joys and fractures of the world that we engage in everyday, the necessity to commit to paper (or to posterity) what weighs upon the heart or head, the existential imperative to express, or the naïve hope of making the world a better place.

In general, the act of poetic creation draws its sap simultaneously from several of these sources. Many a time, however, one of these inspirations is bound to tower over all the rest. In the case of Prerna Gill’s Meanwhile (HarperCollins, 2023), the mysterious seduction of words combined with an urge to dress the world in impenetrable veils of meaning by conscientiously shuffling the charted signifiers and signifieds of language, seem to offer the veritable will-to-poetry.

One is drawn to the studied casualness of the title which, with its quiet, meditated understatement, purports poetry to be a by-the-way affair, a random afterthought. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the title as well as in the book as a whole, there is a skilled juxtaposition of two contiguous temporal frames — the physical and the psychic. The physical frame is the one in which the seemingly significant events of life take place. The psychic frame constitutes the ‘meanwhile’ of poetry.

This ‘meanwhile’ is not to be treated lightly for it is in these pockets of found time that the actual business of confronting the self for survival takes place. Here is a drawn-out negotiation with history, experience, emotions, pain, and trauma, and a poignant reconciliation with each of them. The psychological explorations of the ‘meanwhile’ in this collection are all-absorbing and have the potency to completely obstruct, offset and vanquish the eventful flow of physical time — “it’s always hungry in here” (‘An Hour Stays’). Nevertheless, this is not allowed to happen and both frames persist together, their density often overlapping.

If one pays sufficient aural attention, there is to be heard a silent ticking within Prerna’s poems, a tense balance between the physical or material and the psychic or mental, that threatens at any moment to collapse – “I sink through deep green waters/ To a cement floor buried/ Under boxes, old chairs, a pantheon in a funk” (‘Visit’). The fifty-nine poems in Meanwhile, then, manifest themselves as an acknowledgement of this essential fragility of time, balance, and life — a realisation that if the mind’s playhouse is affected or darkened, the lights in life’s theatre will inevitably be extinguished.

In the author’s words, the book is “an attempt to understand the less-than-shiny things that I can’t quite ignore any longer. The everyday things. The things that let the shadows in.” The paradoxical nature of time, emotional spontaneity and polyphony, the weaving/unweaving of the self, its fragile alignment/dealignment with the world, and the conglomeration of being constitute the thematic canvas of these poems. The cover image of a huge butterfly replacing the forehead and eyes of a human (woman’s) face looms to significance here. The symbolic suggestion of an alternative (inward or non-human) vision is hard to rule out (for animals occupy an enviable space in many poems of this collection) even as one is brought to mind of the butterfly effect of causation that operates, perhaps, most relentlessly in the headspace.

The acuteness of experience, the intensity of its processing, and its configuration through terse but often abrupt and abstruse images constitute the three essential prismatic walls of Meanwhile. Here is a carefully constructed theatre of the mind where lights and sounds radically transform in meaning through connotative and symbolic suggestions. In much of Prerna’s poetry is a semantic and narrative inscrutability that seems to operate as conscious poetic strategy. In the noumenon of these poems is both illumination and construction. Language is both torch and subterfuge, revelation and concealment, statement and retraction so that travelling through these poems is to traverse an experiential space that is deliberately half-lit.

In ‘Unmasked’, the poet writes:

Glaucous moon shivering inches of glass 
She cuts her shape, cuts at it in echo 
Grows it asking after her sons and rent 
The possibility of rain and grandchildren 
And if they glimpsed her first body 
In birthmark, headline, running stitch 

Here, as in many of her pieces, the real and the surreal walk together, undistinguished. In ‘Chedipe’, for instance – “Never could tell if she first saw him/ From behind green bottles or tall grass” – the atmosphere often turns disturbing and sometimes, singularly acherontic. In ‘Tributary’, the witnessing of the phenomenon of death opens a startling avenue of perception:

Until his splintering close enough to see 
How easily a tributary is made: 
A young man slipping from the course of the day 
His hours held close as cards

In these poems’ handling of the self as subject, one finds little narcissism. The mind that is sculpted by particularity of experience, memory and upheaval of feeling is, to be sure, intensely subjective and yet, the distillation of these experiences in poetry makes way for a rich reading. What animates these poems and renders them more than abstract musings of an idiosyncratic mind is their keen and devout understanding of life’s complexity, its essential sense of injustice, and its brief but significant redemptions – “days pressed to currants between/ Pages folded for the edge of winter/And winters still” (‘Ant, Grasshopper’) or “Things of a hard blue sky yearn/ For the only light they do not share” (‘Before This Summer’) The use of short, clipped, often dramatic sentences; the frequent avoidance of punctuation; a polished, urban vocabulary; and an essential belief in the lability of time chisel these poems into pieces reflective of a deeper and highly nuanced reality of the mind as of the world.

The collection has several memorable poems. ‘Bucketsful’, for instance, brilliantly conjures childhood memory, loss, diminishing, and incommunicability through the bulbous image of frogs “Leaping to the rim/ Like it knew a boiling hurry” and ends with words that “balloon my throat and the only ones who would understand them/ Have long skipped town”. In ‘Trees’, the “verdant announcements” of foliage are capable of sustaining life despite its monotony – “Allergies, dry cleaning, soup” so that “in one glance/ The world becomes/ Leaves”. ‘Autopsy’ builds itself around a single cinematic image – “The naked bulb above the table/ Flickered too much” and as a verb, can symbolically extend itself from a person to a situation to life itself. ‘The Dollmaker’, one of those poems that makes the act of reading this collection inseparable from the recognition of the author’s experiences as a woman in the world, skilfully builds up the automated rhythms of a woman’s being in a sexist universe.

Meanwhile, thus, offers a whole new world for our absorption, intriguing in its opacity, and plumbing a depth that is accessible only to those who are prepared to lose themselves in the sharp silhouettes of its images. Here is the gradual but steady eclipsing of material geography to throw light upon the imperialism of the psyche and in this, there is a fine and fluid celluloid effect at work. On the wide screen of language, Prerna’s images travel with a terse celluloid confidence – aware, both, of being and non-being, of leading the reader through a range of signification that can never be pinned down to conclusion, of living a lie and yet upholding the truth.

As a debut collection of poems, Meanwhile stands out for its innovative experimentation with language which borders, often, on the existential, as if sanity and survival depended upon these elaborate linguistic disguises — the trickery of words, the enticement as well as the connotative distance of images, and the impossibility of locating a referential kernel to crack. In the measured pace of Prerna’s poems is a chromatic adventure that navigates the complex terrain of human emotions via a symbolism of shape, feeling and colour illuminating the little-known multiverse of the subconscious – “Square fingers running a pen/ Over prescription or continent” (‘Maps’) or “You, with nights under your fingernails/ Tell no one how it happened” (‘Black’).

In the excavated or found space of ‘meanwhile’ flows a continuous and consistent dialogue between the various selves – the past and the present, the mentor and the mentee, the seeing and the knowing, the forgetful and the cautious, and so on and so forth. When this space transforms itself into the intersubjective bond of poetry it becomes therapeutic, healing both the speaker and the listener from a pain that is deeply shared as inhabitants of a difficult world — “Some mornings I think of a rabbit with orchid ears/ The stray toms left her in a pit in my stomach/ Filled with lettuce and sweet straw (‘Keeping’) or “In this way, we are brittle femur/ And like this, we are sky” (‘White’).

The world will, perhaps, continue to be what it is. Meanwhile, here is a book that promises to be a friend.

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others. 

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