Book Review by Gazala Khan
Title: This Could Be a Love Poem for You
Author: Ranu Uniyal
Publisher: Red River
This Could Be a Love Poem for You by Ranu Uniyal, is her fifth collection of poems. Uniyal is a passionate bilingual poet at heart, a retired professor of English literature by profession and an inspiration to many budding poets. Across the Divide (2006), The Day We Went Strawberry Picking in Scarborough (2018), December Poems (2012) and Saeeda Ke Ghar (In Saeeda’s home, Hindi, 2021) are some other significant contributions made by the poet.
“Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful, you find co-existence; it breaks walls down.” A quote by Mahmoud Darwish is reflective of Dr Uniyal’s poignant portrayal of human existence layered with love, grief, crises and relationships with the One (Self) and the World.
The collection is an aesthetic delight that traverses the heart of the readers with astute directness and a distinct confessional tone. It has three segments: ‘Dust My Regrets’, ‘Be a Good Girl’ and ‘Thy Eternal Grace’. Collectively, there are 62 poems in all.
The poems start from the personal and move to the universal with their intricate details. The poetic sensibilities take us to the female imaginary of the physical, psychological and spiritual domains. If Kamala Das in the 20th century introduced the readers to her brazenness in poetry, then Ranu Uniyal in the 21st century coerces her readers to travel from the common routine to the coveted spiritual abode found in the creative doctrine of poetry. The poetic depth can also be inferred through the rhythmic structure, the play with the words through alliteration and rhymes introduce jibes in poems such as ‘The Shop and the Shutter’.
The themes of love, identity, self-expression, language and power, old age, body’s fragility, vulnerability, precarity, loss, women and domesticity, motherhood, death and memory are persistent throughout the anthology. She poetically contours the theme of human existence and its distinct flavours like WB Yeats in Sailing to Byzantium with — “That is no country for old men.”
The poetic pondering over the question of ‘Self’ or recurrent declaration of ‘I’ is developed through linguistic, racial, and geographical temporal identities. For example, the poet’s ‘Garhwali’ identity is camouflaged with the the more modern Anglophone identity. The declaration of the personal “self” and dedication to some personalities like Mohini Mangalik, S. A. Hamid and Amma takes us to the glints of the poet’s biography in the most poetic manner. Gulzar once uttered that, “we poets are errant grains of dust… life takes us and tosses us, we do not know where it will end.” The poems hail the essence of life’s evolutionary journey, especially the one of experience and the mature years of life.
Her poems present multiple binaries: of love and grief, seller and buyer, life and death, through picturesque imagery. Additionally, the poet familiarises the readers with the references to the pagan myths from diverse cultures, Christ, Nachiketa, Yama, Isis, which also introduce us to the eco-folklorists’ traditions which is a delight to explore.
She writes in aphorisms at times and critiques the personal and public crises. The poem, ‘Only Grief’, provocatively emotes the climate crisis as an apocalyptic warning through a distant voice from the future, wherein, critiquing the war-torn present world and the catastrophic space left for the progeny of the future.
We sang dangerously of the failure.
Of our prodigal ancestors.
Another poem, ‘From One Life to Another’, reflects a similar concern about the cataclysmic/tragic climate situations left for the future:
Sparrows and crows have
been hushed to silence.
The once-green acacia shrieked
as they chopped her limbs.
Nature and motherhood hold each other’s hands in sharing the identity of exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, the intricate details through the lens of the ecofeminist poetic sensibilities highlight the diversified literary corpus in the anthology. The same poem states further:
I was once a tree- all green.
Very tall, bobbing in the wind.
I had leaves, branches.
And occasional flowers.
I, too, had a name.
A woman. A mother.
Once a tree.
I brush them aside,
My tears, an upright foliage
Lying heavy on my chest.
Dr Uniyal can be set alongside the “literary greats” like Kamla Das and Sujata Bhatt.
The usage of the colloquial vernacular Hindi words and phrases makes it more personal, tinctured with cultural aesthetics.
The eponymous poem in the anthology, ‘This Could Be a Love Poem for You’ is raw and personal between the one waiting for the other partner far away from a distance is the talisman of the relationship, the theme that finds its way again and again in the poet’s poetic oeuvre. This colourful and mature anthology glossed with distinct sonorous imagery could indeed be a reflective love poem for the present and for our progeny, the rightful claimants, who would reminisce over the past. It’s a love poem about resilience and human existence that shall follow the hearts of the readers for a long, dialogic course of expressions and insights.
Gazala Khan teaches in the Department of English at Doon University, Dehradun, India. She has published poetry in magazines such as Setu, Borderless, and The Fictional Café and has been consistently working on creative and literary projects.
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