Sucharita Dutta-Asane reviews After Grief by Shikhandin in The Bangalore Review/

/

The journey, though, is demanding – it requires the mind to cull and remember moments that one would rather push under the carpet, banish into hidden, dark corners. Some of the most difficult poems in terms of this movement belong to Parts IV and V of the book. These are intimate poems, poems of struggle, images segueing from one difficult, deepening emotion into another, groping to understand what was, emotions recollected as well as lived, and thus, more layered in trying to understand the mother-daughter relationship as well as the traces it has left behind. These poems are complex in their emotional weave, tangling and disentangling the skeins of the desire for affection and finding in its place the memory of its absence. Here, the poems are connected by memory and its “bones”, imagination fills the spaces of a child’s remembered yearning for her mother’s affection, the adult’s bitter recalling of what was not, followed by the slow laying-to-rest, the word-images shifting from poem to poem, from “rage-cindered… quartz”,  to “the fist that slammed out through your vagina” to “My forehead burnt with the history we are counselled to forget” to, finally, “tides on a shore./ Nothing less nothing more” (pp 48-59).

/

Read the complete review here. https://bangalorereview.com/2022/07/from-threnody-to-laughter-a-review-of-shikhandins-after-grief/