It’s a slim volume, 70-odd pages which, until you’ve turned them, betray nothing of the world they hide inside. You don’t suppose for a moment that the distance they span crosses borders and time and age and gender and identities; that a few lines can hold infinity before they are spent in seconds and minutes. K. Srilata’s new collection of poems, Bookmarking the Oasis , is an inky testimony to words and their malleability, a delicious promise that fleeting moments can be caught on paper and turned into eternities.
In this volume, Srilata brings together new poems and threads them together with older ones, printed before in other anthologies and collections. To read this entire collection in a single sitting, which is what I did, is a bit like looking through a particularly intricate kaleidoscope. The effect is stunning and overwhelming, and every turn of the page offers a new combination of colours and emotions and ideas, so that you fight the temptation to remain in that moment and the urge to move to the next one.
The other way, perhaps the softer, sweeter way, is to return to the collection, to dip in and dip out, a single poem at a time. It is then that their meaning grows, and the luxury of time allows you to stop and linger over the pure craft of Srilata’s words and their arrangement. Sometimes, a turn of phrase that can be enjoyed for itself, and in some of the poems in this collection, Srilata gives you the chance to do just that.
Sometimes, like in Bright Blue Bird , there is a playful note to her words: A bright blue bird/ from a distant tree/ flies into my house. When it flies out/ it leaves behind/ its bright blue . She explores, in this poem, the process of creativity, charting the very birth of a poem, of an idea, and while the usual metaphors, analogies, symbolism are all present, all identifiable, the poem remains light, almost feathery in texture, shot through with the very essence of the bird at its centre.
In A Grey Umbrella of Early November Rains , once again the words carry the essence of the poem, wrapped around phrases that are familiar: It is early November/ The rains are desolate/ like the grey of school uniforms/ she will now never wear.
With everyday words and familiar phrases, Srilata tells us new stories, and gives old stories new meanings. A floating bit of overheard conversation between strangers on a conveyor belt taken every day, a school girl dreaming of next year, a classroom conversation on Chaucer, a lost pet, a road trip, a new home, an old stone — nothing is too commonplace, and each poem a reminder that poetry can exist between the folds of old, discarded experiences.
It is difficult to dismantle Srilata’s poems; unfair to take them apart and analyse them, because she does away with the need for that. Read as a whole, these poems convey their meaning easily, each line helping the other, so that you know what it means to you. Sometimes, you share the meaning with the poet, and sometimes, the experience becomes your own, a personal entry in a diary you didn’t write.
It is this insight, this understanding of the human experience, which is perhaps the greatest triumph of Srilata’s work. She captures emotions that lack words, which exist in dreams and laughter and despair. In Weekday Mornings, She Rides the School Bus , Srilata paints for us just the dim, hazy outlines of a schoolgirl’s daydreams, while in Milestones , she hides an entire life in few syllables worth of questions: ...Eating habits?/Puberty?/ Bed-wetting?/ Nightmares?/ Tantrums?/ Did she come when called?/ At once?...
Several poems in the collection hinge on memories — of people and places and experiences that have been preserved. Srilata revisits them, exploring the new faces time has given them. In two lines, ending what she calls A Found Poem From a Fourth Grader’s Notebook , she asks What is worth remembering?/ What is worth forgetting?
In the poems that make up the rest of the collection, she proceeds to explore and answer this very question, capturing with verse not just the passage of time and the evanescent quality of our own lived experiences, but also the idea that poetry can both re-affirm life and its meaning.
