Lounge
A book of poetry that is an archive of absence and presence
Summary
K. Srilata's collection of poetry, ‘Three Women in a Single-Room House’, reflects on the challenges and complexities of motherhood, identity, and the impact of the pandemic
In her preface to the book, Three Women in a Single-Room House, K. Srilata says, “I think of poetry as a continuous struggle against amnesia, a mode of bearing mindful witness to and remembering the lives of those we love. These poems are an archiving of the self in a web of inter-being, a logbook of human presences and absences." She then proceeds to tell the readers about her circumstances, her family history and the ways that the contours of her life were shaped by her experiences, by the persons whom she met or hadn’t met, by the policies of her state even and as we turn the pages of this book, her words coalesce into a rousing life-narrative through poetry.
In Three Women in a Single-Room House, K. Srilata K. creates a slim volume of verse that offers poetic control. Using poems of varying lengths on interconnected themes, she creates light and shadows. While she has always been polyphonous, Three Women employs multiple voices to populate a single poetic universe that soon we too find ourselves living in. With each poem, the reader is drawn to invest in the poems and in the lives that have been narrated. While many of the poems are confessional or personal—after all Srilata counts Kamala Das as one of her inspirations—there is something about the poems that makes it everyone’s story.
The book begins powerfully with the titular poem exploring how women occupy spaces. This idea of space and its occupancy continue in the poems that follow.
The telegram that arrived was petal-wrinkled.
I knew right away.
Grandmother dead. Stop. Come at once. Stop
(She was the Kind of Woman who Liked Such Stories)
The entire span of the life and times of the grandmother seems to be ensconced in the space of the telegram. The poems that deal with the complexities of being a parent brilliantly present the series of uncertainties that plague parents. One such poem is Not in the Picture, where the visual is the proof of a life, a reflection of absences in real life and at times the only place where editing is possible. It is powerful in the visceral way it looks at the photograph as memoir and memory.
The book beautifully embeds the political and the social into the personal, leading to works that seem to be having a conversation with the reader about the pressures of motherhood, the patriarchy and its self-indulgent ways, the exhausting grind of being a woman of a certain age—of being a woman, really, of being a square peg in a round hole, of being disabled, of dealing with the everydays that we call life. These could be poems about any ten random people you stop on the street.
Srilata explores the pandemic and the panic it struck. The crushing loneliness and desolation, coupled with the silences will definitely resonate. Having stood in supermarket aisles in a time when only five people were allowed into the shop, I instantly understood the import of ‘Who wears perfume in the middle of all this?’ in Shopping for Groceries on a Pandemic Morning. It appears the pandemic brought out the adventurer in Srilata as she ventures into Haibun and the result is equally wonderful, the distilled vision of the poet strikes a chord.
One of the principal questions we ask ourselves when we pick up a book is “Why must I read this? Three Women in a Single-Room House must be read for the beautiful, prismatic way it looks at life. The surprises it springs in the ways that it imagines the world around us—when an overused toothbrush is referred to as a “toothbrush that has flowered slightly", or when “we break into butterflies" show there is beauty in the sordid and Srilata tells us that we have some more living to do. The bittersweet, slightly burnt taste of life has rarely been expressed with such ingenuity, compassion, beauty and intelligence as in this book.
There is considerable experimentation and where the earlier poems of the poet such as What the Tamil Poet Says About Herself in Her Bio note and Because I Never Learned the Names of Trees in Tamil read into the intricacies of Thamizh, the poems in this collection experience language as universal—the sense of ghutan (first in italics as a foreign word or feeling and then in normal font as it becomes normalised and pervasive) in one poem becomes the inability to breathe on account of police brutality, becomes symbolic of migrant workers and their trudge back during the pandemic, becomes a promise not kept to future generations.
This transformative quality of Srilata’s work keeps the reader engaged in an intimate conversation with the book and with their own selves. I feel that this book presents a significant marker in the poetic life of K. Srilata. There is a sense of storytelling and I have a feeling that this five-book veteran is only getting started.
Sonya J. Nair is a poet and the curator of ‘Anantha’, an online international festival of poetry. She serves as the head of the department of English, All Saints’ College, Thiruvananthapuram.
