Bitter Gourd : Poems- Anupama Raju

Description

‘Anupama Raju’s poems make their home in a museum of shifting moods, where sticky glass-noodle lovers heave into view and subside again. We are led into the many idiolects of intimacy that speak of duty and desire, connect and disconnect, as ‘dot’ and ‘line’ dance a tango of mutual need, feeding off each other, at times, ‘like varicose veins’. These lurching, fluid poems seek a still point in a self that is a mangled heart of two. At the same time, they are anchored in an inner knowing that love, for all its challenges, is still, somehow, ‘prayer’.’  — Arundhathi Subramaniam

‘Anupama Raju’s Bitter Gourd reminds us, in ways both subtle and dramatic, of the deep archetypal patterns and epiphanic joys that lie concealed beneath the surfaces of the everyday. The simple acts of cleaning the house, making a meal, picking out a colour or missing a loved one become imbued, in Raju’s telling, with the plangency of fables recalled from long ago, the resonance of songs heard in the distance. These are richly sensuous poems, alive with the fragrance of food, the texture of fabric, the intimate proximity of body and breath, the radical vulnerability of the generous spirit.

Bitter Gourd crafts the anguish and ardour of lived experience into the memorable phrasing of epigram and aphorism: ‘I will be as empty as a hand / that never knew touch / if I were to be separated from you’.’  — Ranjit Hoskote