(for details of the books click here)
read I GREW UP IN AN AGE OF POETS, HOW TO READ INDIAN MYTH, TONGUE AND A SONG FOR CATABOLIC WOMEN─a FEW OF ARUNDHATHI’S POEMS FROM love WITHOUT A STORY, bloodaxe books, uk, 2020
read when god is a traveller AND learning to say yes, from When God is a Traveller, HarperCollins, India, and Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2014
read prayer AND For A Poem, Still Unborn from Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2009
arundhathi reads out ‘song for catabolic women’ [From Love Without a Story, Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2020] on firstpost
arundhathi reads out some poems from love without a story, bloodaxe books in a video celebrating its publication
Arundhathi Subramaniam reads and introduces a selection of poems from two Bloodaxe titles, When God Is a Traveller and Where I Live: New & Selected Poems:
Arundhathi reads out eight poems from Where I Live: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2009): ‘Winter, Delhi, 1997’, ‘To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian’, ‘Prayer’, ‘Home’, ‘Madras’, ‘I Live on a Road’, ‘Recycled’ and ‘Confession’.
I Grew Up in an Age of Poets
(‘Best to meet in poems’ – Eunice de Souza)
I grew up in an age of poets
who told me joy
was for cabbages
until I found
that beneath their smoking
empires of sulphur
there lay a shiver
of doubt,
that they wondered,
as I did,
about what it might mean
to be leafy,
to wilt,
to be damaged sometimes
by upstart caterpillars
and still stay green─
chaotically, wetly, powerfully
green.
Now I meet poets
who exchange visiting cards,
are best friends with the dentist,
all dankness deodorised,
their poems cool seashells,
their laughter splintered eggshells,
poets who never seem
to wonder
about cabbages
at all.
Still best to meet in poems.
[From Love Without a Story, Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2020]
How to Read Indian Myth
(for AS who wonders)
How to read Indian myth?
The way I read Greek, I suppose ─
not worrying too much about
foreign names
and plots,
knowing there is never
a single point
to any story,
taking the red hibiscus route
into the skin,
alert to trapdoors, willing
to blunder a little in the dark,
slightly drunk
on Deccan sun,
but with a spring in the step
that knows
we are fundamentally
corky,
built to float,
built to understand,
and the chemical into which we are tumbling
will sustain,
has sustained before,
knows a way through,
knows a way beyond,
knows
the two
aren’t separate.
Read it like you would read a love story.
Your own.
[From Love Without a Story, Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2020]
Tongue
‘The tongue is alone and tethered in its mouth’ – John Berger
The man in front of me
is reading
a balance sheet.
He is smiling, his gaze
shimmying between columns,
effortlessly
bilingual.
And though a little drunk
on the liquor of profit
I like to think he is not immune
to the sharp beauty
of integers, simmering
with their own inner life,
and I wonder if he feels
the way I do sometimes
around words,
waiting for them to lead me
past the shudder
of tap root
past the inkiness
of groundwater
to those places
where all tongues meet─
calculus, Persian, Kokborok, flamenco,
the tongue sparrows know, and accountants,
and those palm trees at the far end
of holiday photographs,
your tongue,
mine,
the kiss that knows
from where the first songs sprang,
forested and densely plural,
the kiss that knows
no separation.
[From Love Without a Story, Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2020]
Song for Catabolic Women
We’re bound for the ocean
and a largesse of sky,
we’re not looking for the truth
or living a lie.
We’re coming apart,
we’re going downhill,
the fury’s almost done,
we’ve had our fill.
We’re passionate, ironic
angelic, demonic,
clairvoyant, rational
wildly Indian, anti-national.
We’re not trying to make our peace
not itching for a fight,
we don’t need your shade
and we don’t need your light.
We know charisma isn’t contagious
and most rules are egregious.
We’re catabolic women.
We’ve known the refuge of human arms,
the comfort of bathroom floors,
we’ve stormed out of rooms,
thrown open the doors.
We’ve figured the tricks to turn rage
into celebration,
we know why the oldest god dances
at every cremation.
We’ve kissed in the rose garden,
been the belles of the ball,
hidden under bedcovers
and we’ve stood tall.
We’re not interested in camouflage
or self-revelation,
not looking for a bargain
or an invitation.
We’re capable of stillness
even as we gallivant,
capable of wisdom
even as we rant.
Look into our eyes,
you’ll see we’re almost through.
We can be kind but we’re not really
thinking of you.
We don’t remember names
and we don’t do Sudoku.
We’re losing EQ and IQ,
forgetting to say please and thank you.
We’re catabolic women
We’ve never ticked the right boxes,
never filled out the form,
our dharma is tepid,
our politics lukewarm.
We’ve had enough of earnestness
and indignation
but still keep the faith
in conversation.
We’re wily Easterners enough
to argue nirvana and bhakti,
talk yin and yang,
Shiva and Shakti.
When we’re denied a visa
we fall back on astral travel
and when samsara gets intense
we simply unravel.
We’re unbuilding now,
unperpetuating,
unfortifying,
disintegrating.
We’re caterwauling,
catastrophic,
shambolic,
cataclysmic,
catabolic women.
[From Love Without a Story, Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2020]
WHEN GOD IS A TRAVELLER
(wondering about Kartikeya, Muruga, Subramania, my namesake)
Trust the god
back from his travels,
his voice wholegrain
(and chamomile),
his wisdom neem,
his peacock, sweaty-plumed,
drowsing in the shadows.
Trust him
who sits wordless on park benches
listening to the cries of children
fading into the dusk,
his gaze emptied of vagrancy,
his heart of ownership.
Trust him
who has seen enough –
revolutions, promises, the desperate light
of shopping malls, hospital rooms,
manifestos, theologies, the iron taste
of blood, the great craters in the middle
of love.
Trust him
who no longer begrudges
his brother his prize,
his parents their partisanship.
Trust him
whose race is run,
whose journey remains,
who stands fluid-stemmed
knowing he is the tree
that bears fruit, festive
with sun.
Trust him
who recognizes you –
auspicious, abundant, battle-scarred,
alive –
and knows from where you come.
Trust the god
ready to circle the world all over again
this time for no reason at all
other than to see it
through your eyes.
(from When God is a Traveller, HarperCollins, India, and Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2014)
LEARNING TO SAY YES
They matter,
the minor questions –
the smell of a new wardrobe,
the eternal bus ticket
in the bag’s second compartment, the leer
of the late shift security guard.
Yes, Draupadi’s sari is endless
and there’s no way to tame
life’s wild unstoppable
bureaucracy
but this:
Fill out the form. Do it in bloody triplicate. Enroll.
(from When God is a Traveller, HarperCollins, India, and Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2014)
PRAYER
May things stay the way they are
in the simplest place you know.
May the shuttered windows
keep the air as cool as bottled jasmine.
May you never forget to listen
to the crumpled whisper of sheets
that mould themselves to your sleeping form.
May the pillows always be silvered
with cat-down and the muted percussion
of a lover’s breath.
May the murmur of the wall clock
continue to decree that your providence
run ten minutes slow.
May nothing be disturbed
in the simplest place you know
for it is here in the foetal hush
that blueprints dissolve
and poems begin,
and faith spreads like the hum of crickets,
faith in a time
when maps shall fade,
nostalgia cease
and the vigil end.
(from Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2009)
FOR A POEM, STILL UNBORN
Over tea we wonder why we write poetry.
Ten people read it, anyway.
Three are committed in advance
to disliking it.
Three feel a vague pang
but have leaking taps and traffic jams
to think about.
Two like it
and wouldn’t mind telling you so,
but don’t know how.
Another is busy preparing questions
about pat ironies
and identity politics.
The tenth is wondering
whether you wear contact lenses.
And we,
as soiled as anyone else
in a world addicted
to carbohydrates
and conversations without pauses,
still groping
among sunsets and line lengths
and slivers of hope
for a moment
unstained
by the wild contagion
of habit.
(from Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2009)
Arundhathi Subramaniam 