Book Review: Black Wind and Other Poems by Deepti Naval.
Poetry is an art form I tend to look at with scepticism. I enjoy a Neruda (now with a lot of self-loathing), I enjoy Frank O'Hara, Ginsberg is beau, I weep because of Alice Walker, Anjum Hasan has a special place too. And Ruskin Bond is my comfort food. But poetry is something I will judge strictly.
While looking for poetry books for references in office, I stumbled upon this little book. Deepti Naval is an amazing actress I grew up watching on screen. From the sensual village dame to middle-class housewife to murderous old sarpanch, she is striking. Hence it was a surprise to find out that she writes poetry.
A collection of poetry she had written in the 90s and early 2000s: the book has long narrative poems, short line poems, middle length musings, and epithets.
The primary focus is on: the experience of loss, mental illness, grief, hypersensitivity, childbirth, miscarriage, suicide. Themes well explored yet underappreciated.
Some pieces are beautiful and stinging, some poems are disjointed words on a string. We see her writing skills mature as we progress through the poems. The better poems are at end of the book, ones she wrote after spending 23 days in the asylum. As the introduction says she has lived the experience twice as an actress and as a poet rearranged them.
The poems are scary, sad, liberating and most importantly focus on a perverse sense of empowerment in confinement, free of all social bindings and decorum the mind is free, so freaking free that it doesn't register rape or differentiate blood from abir/gulal.
The condition of women in mental asylums in India is not an honourable one, hospitals often sterilized patients, shaved their heads, sexually harassed them, mistreated them and so on. The poems on madness are closest to lived experience and observations of those conditions.
Another theme common to her book is the loss of love, and subtle flirting with death in imagination and testing the thin line of division between sanity and insanity.
A poem I loved 'Smita and I', a sad long poem dedicated to Smita Patil. The preface, introduction, foreword, and afterword were insightful but short and not enough.
As anthology the book is good, but not a book that will stand the test of time, language was crafty and honest but needed more depth and maybe a little more push towards the abyss of insanity would have helped.
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