Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra
Title: Setting Traps for Light
Author: Giti Chandra
Publisher: Hachette India
Setting Traps for Light is a debut collection of poems by Giti Chandra which is illuminated and irradiated by her unique and multifaceted artistry. She is a writer, poet, painter and musician. She is also an academic– in all quite a tall order. As is to be expected given her remarkable gifts, her writing is both luminous and beautiful.
In literary interviews hosted by cultural platforms like Platform Magazine, Chandra shared that the title originated from her hobby of using her mobile phone camera to capture how light hitting ordinary everyday objects completely transforms them. The title — Setting Traps for Light — acts as a luminous metaphor for discovering and working towards courage, hope, and resilience in the middle of personal grief, political trauma, and climate anxieties.
Many of these anxieties, of migration and change — climate and otherwise — are refracted obliquely through her poetry. Events that have been relegated to the background of consciousness, surface suddenly, often unexpectedly. Chandra’s verses often act as a prism, refracting the everyday, the mundane to bursts of sudden illumination. For instance, in ‘Ode to the Ordinary’, she celebrates the “unwashed beauty of the Ordinary day, the unnoticed, unapplauded/ Transcience of the repetitively mundane/The ubiquitously profane/Say it now in romantic rhyme/The ordinary is the Skylark of our time.”
Here is an instance of turning the everyday into the sublime, elevating the quotidian, the seemingly trivial into a polished gem. In a beautiful illustration of the individual talent constructing and honing a poetic tradition, she expresses her gratitude to her poetic predecessors, interlacing their phrases into the fabric, the warp and the weft of her own poetry:
A month of poems ends
With a day dedicated to labour.
A month that began
With a day dedicated to Fools.
Therein lies, perhaps, a metaphor
Requiring another set of tools.
References to Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Shakespeare are strewn across the poem. Similarly, she alludes to Ghalib and Faiz, Ludhianvi and Mira who “solder and weld the self and creation.” She continues:
But of all the names and works of hands
Those of you, all banded here
Are closest to the bone. You stand
Together and walk the way
From All Fools to Labour Day.
Replete with scriptural echoes, the poem becomes a poetic manifesto of sorts attesting to the hard work, the perspiration that is welded in the smithy of the poet’s soul and is then acknowledged and recognised as genius. By bringing in references to Yeats’s hammer and Eliot’s chisel, poetry is apprehended as something material that brings together both inspiration and perspiration. Fleeting moments are honed to enduring monuments alchemising the transcient and the evanescent into something more lasting and profound, something rich and strange.
The fact that Chandra is an artist par excellence is evident in the strong visual imagery and metaphors that inform her poetry. The fact that she is a trained musician is also expressed in the mellifluous cadences of her verse, in the rise and fall of words, in the rhythms and segues of free and blank verse. The fact that she is an brilliant scholar /student with a keen and perceptive eye, is attested to by the evocative title of her first poetry collection, which has been a while in the making.
Even though she understands the temptations and potential risk of resorting to Romantic conceit, Chandra soldiers on to write her experiences of climate change and crisis, the unimaginable misery of the long walk home that characterised the movement of migrant labour in India in 2020 when the Covid crisis unfolded. The poet here becomes a witness, a chronicler of critical events as she poignantly narrates the death of a twelve-year-old boy. Elsewhere, she writes of the paradox and the “irony that we /Fight for air.” There is a reference to George Floyd who had a “knee on neck, face down/Grit on cheek, no breath to speak,/No bed to sleep on, etherised/In our castles, safe in locked/Towns.” The use of the word “etherised” had been immortalised by T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Chandra has used it to suggest the numbness of contemporary civilisation in a state of crisis.
Chandra’s poetry opens up vast vistas and redefines the poet’s function-of playing witness, of chronicling change, treading oft-trod paths anew. Some poems also offer social commentary like ‘Simple Rhymes for Difficult Times’. In a series of apparently innocuous lines, the poet writes:
“Peace be in your streets/ Let no neighbour inspect/Your larder for its meats./Let no man suspect/Your daughter of eyeing/Mates of other castes./Peace be in your markets/As people shop between fasts”. The reference leads inescapably to the current trends of food vigilantism. It evocatively explores loosening and binding, movement and migration, loss and desolation. A running theme is that of courage[1] , on which there are thematic and tonal variations.
In the poem ‘Love in the Time of Climate Change’, there are not only a Arnold’s poignant lines from Dover Beach: “Ah love,let us be true /To one another,” but also echoes and resonances from Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Contemporary anxieties and concerns meld with eternal verities and create a delectable smorgasbord of emotions: ‘‘Our love shall be a raft, fuelled /By no heat, in a world bent on burning. /Deserts and dry continents are no grounds/ For deserting. We shall find our feet/To a love of no returning.” The brilliance of these lines lie not just in the skillful use of enjambment and caesura, but the deft summing of the lyrical tradition.
The central metaphor of “setting traps for light” acts as an active, deliberate pursuit of hope, beauty, and clarity. Instead of waiting for illumination to arrive passively, the poet argues that one must construct “traps”—through memory, art, and close observation—to capture fleeting moments of joy and truth. With her transnational themes and multiple and extended locations, Chandra’s poetry truly seems to inhabit a borderless world.
The collection ends with a reminder that poetry is a commitment and an act of faith. In the penultimate poem, ‘When You Run Out of Words’: “Poets/ have said that you should speak/Because your lips, your tongue/Are free and the truth lives still.” Further, she insists that “all/Shall not be well/Till you are well.”
The brave new world of Chandra’s poetry involves integrity and truth telling. While musings on death and mutability are profoundly present in her debut collection of poems, the tone is not necessarily despairing. Somber and meditative, lyrical and reflective, the poems make us think, even as they transport us into a delightful realm and an enchanted forest of words.
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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