HYDERABAD: Noted poet Arundhathi Subramaniam writes in the blurb: “… a book that unlocks the uncomfortable rooms of the human heart with vulnerability, courage, and wry humour.” As you turn pages, the poet’s heart throws a rope for you to climb up and then delve deep inside its chambers. But that doesn’t happen without traversing the slippery walls that lead to everyday routine of black coffee, biscuit tin, lipstick and an array of day-to-day objects that are more symbolic between the stanzas than their actual use. Srividya Sivakumar in her book ‘the heart is an attic’ explores and disseminates different layers of the heart that sometimes rejuvenates itself inside its own pool of recollections, which later much to one’s surprise, comes across as somewhat familiar.
Her poems observe the ‘unlayering’ emerge as a cohesive whole while the reader unearths his/her own heart only to find himself in the same monument as that of the poet as all works of art revisit the memories that have built them. You go inside, open the glass-cupboards, touch the paraphernalia within and be part of the particles that visit the crannies separating ‘now’ and ‘then’. This thin layer, that also separates them, provides a panoramic view to the reader to look at the vales vast open on the other side of the wall. It’s not possible to fathom its entire depth, but it’s very much likely that the glance changes something within given the same wavelength of resonance it finds itself aligned with. She writes in the poem ‘Orchestrated’:
Your body is music and poetry
The structure, thus, gives way to the lush spaces the heart is originally known to reside in. The note of a beloved defines the lover’s anatomy in soft notes: its simplification in sync with the poet’s mood which flows on clefs reaching the gradual crescendo. This transcends in other poems, too, where the poet just celebrates the lover and the love for the body, too. She’s bold in her approach and takes her
femininity forward to chisel the architecture of her poetry. However, the fractures in love appear in poems like ‘Reclaimed Land’ where she’s angry-sad at her lover for forsaking her.
She fictionalises this reality with strawberry margarita lip gloss claiming the islands that are hers. She sets sail for them burning everything that puts an embargo in her way. In another poem ‘AuthaGraph’, which means an approximately equal-area world map projection invented by a Japanese architect, she explores the terrains of the body again through the lover’s eyes and ends the poem with the pointed question addressed to his fingers: “Does it know my heart?” The query spreads itself across the pages that end up in the attic of the heart itself. The space, though cosy, multiplies each time it is visited.
The light inside changes with windows capturing the seasons that dripped long ago from old logs. The smell in the space is both musty and musky that converge with the air the visitor brings. The walls surrounding him, transform before collapsing into a sea that maps the way to his own heart. The book may not provide companionship but holds the lantern to help find the staircase that leads up to this very attic.
Publisher: Hawakal Publishers
Price: `300
— Saima Afreen
saima@newindianexpress
@Sfreen