When Agony Meets Fragility
HYDERABAD: ‘Death in a Holy Month’ offers a repository of images running in succession to arrive at a point from where the poet Sufia Khatoon sees the anatomy of the poems. The words measure her personal pain which she combines with the universal to arrive at a selection which hints to the lacunae within forever in the quest for respite.
The Calcutta-based poet uses floral images to offer fragility that finds its companion in the verses she compiles through the screams in her woman-body, prayers her mother offers, different shades of the sun, and an overdose of ripening mangoes that her grandfather forbids her from eating. Marigold, hibiscus, and dandelions bloom in the lines that sometimes read like snippets in a young girl’s diary and sometimes placed with the precise attention that they truly deserve.
The interesting title holds the attention of introducing the reader to the deaths that the poet has witnessed. The book doesn’t offer any medicine instead attempts to bring together fragility and frivolousness that the human heart is both blessed and cursed with.She explores nature in her own unseasoned way as if she were stumbling upon piles of oranges, October skies and rain silently uprooting what she’d known or seen otherwise.
The newly-discovered encounters in language and geography aren’t accidental. They were meant to be around which she lights wood-smoke, sits down and offers what her fingers have managed to pour both on the ground and the paper. And while the smoke still lingers brushing the ceiling under which she ponders to ‘craft a paper-heart’ and paper dolls wondering ‘if the stars too were made of paper’. But they are not. They ooze blood. They smear her hands. Her body. Her words. The trails lead to the years that have also offered her healing as she writes:
A handful of blood,
A white flower,
Souls of the dead,
A piece on peace remained
Penned down as a prayer.
She follows the breeze tracing ‘cauliflower clouds’ and some more sparkling images, but sometimes the arrangement is a bit loose that interferes with the flow. A few lines need more soaking time in their own juices to release the final flavour. Despite that poem like ‘Surmedani’ [small metallic cases for storing collyrium] stay with the reader given the dark powder brings and holds tears. This is what Sufia Khatoon attempts to do in this book.
Available on Amazon.in
Publisher: Hawakal Publishers
Price: Rs 300