dhiyanah's review
5.0
Light and dark meet in these poems to reestablish wholeness between opposing forces. Love lives with displacement, transmuting grief into healing and redemption. Both Inanna as Ishtar the morning and evening star, and Lucifer as Morning Star link us to Venus, goddess of love, as well as the planet whose astrological body informs in us the ways we connect and express intimacy. These mythological and symbolic narratives act as checkpoints in the navigational map of ‘The Altar of the Only World.’ Along the way, Sita also finds Surpanakha and Draupadi for us. The collective presence of these archetypes of longing and unbelonging are felt in symbolism, imagery, and language that is sublime and cosmic - eager to be traced and retraced like Ariadne’s thread deep into each poem where we perhaps might hear our own shadow’s voice reverberating through.
Read my full review of "The Altar of the Only World" here:
https://www.bydhiyanah.com/blog/2018/8/7/remember-me-in-mud
Read my full review of "The Altar of the Only World" here:
https://www.bydhiyanah.com/blog/2018/8/7/remember-me-in-mud
thebookdog's review
5.0
“How do I tell you, except by telling you —
How because of longing I almost died.
How because of language I lived.”
I am not going to tell you about the verses and the metaphors. Not about the themes and the imagery. But I want to tell you about how I received Sharanya Manivannan’s The Altar of The Only World and how I feel after reading her poems.
The book reached me on the day when my breath was uneven and when I could feel something throbbing in my throat. Anxiety. An unexpected guest. A painful one at that. It was hard to do anything on that kind of a day. I only wanted to wait for the nightfall and answer the call of darkness.
But against the beam of light that escaped the orange curtains in my bedroom, the cover glittered. Gold and black. It drank the evening light. Its thirst was not greedy, but graceful like a cat’s. When I held the book, it looked like a lantern in my hand. I read a poem randomly and it called me a light-bearer. Love.
I began from the beginning, picked up a pen, and started having a conversation with the poems. I wrote in the sides, over the words, beneath the poems:
That aches!
Where are these goddesses?
You are not alone.
I hear your lament.
Drink that ocean.
Make me a fire-eater.
I hear your music.
Give me those flowers.
Pure pleasure.
Oh! Dear Venus!
Delirious. Delirious. Delirious
My father would have held my hand and saved the book from the assault. But some books have to be read that way. I need to talk, tell the book that it’s causing a maelstrom, and still surrender to it. Love.
I intend to read The Altar of The Only World in other ways too — I want to read it to a friend who is nursing a broken heart, send it to a friend who wants to crawl out of an abyss, leave it in a temple, hide it in a chest, and read it along with a friend who wouldn’t cure my feverish love with cynicism.
Above all, I wish to treat the book like it’s a soothsayer. I want to walk to my bookshelf, pick up the book, open a page, and receive my word. Bibliomancy.
worncorners's review
5.0
“How do I tell you, except by telling you —
How because of longing I almost died.
How because of language I lived.”
I am not going to tell you about the verses and the metaphors. Not about the themes and the imagery. But I want to tell you about how I received Sharanya Manivannan’s The Altar of The Only World and how I feel after reading her poems.
The book reached me on the day when my breath was uneven and when I could feel something throbbing in my throat. Anxiety. An unexpected guest. A painful one at that. It was hard to do anything on that kind of a day. I only wanted to wait for the nightfall and answer the call of darkness.
But against the beam of light that escaped the orange curtains in my bedroom, the cover glittered. Gold and black. It drank the evening light. Its thirst was not greedy, but graceful like a cat’s. When I held the book, it looked like a lantern in my hand. I read a poem randomly and it called me a light-bearer. Love.
I began from the beginning, picked up a pen, and started having a conversation with the poems. I wrote in the sides, over the words, beneath the poems:
That aches!
Where are these goddesses?
You are not alone.
I hear your lament.
Drink that ocean.
Make me a fire-eater.
I hear your music.
Give me those flowers.
Pure pleasure.
Oh! Dear Venus!
Delirious. Delirious. Delirious
My father would have held my hand and saved the book from the assault. But some books have to be read that way. I need to talk, tell the book that it’s causing a maelstrom, and still surrender to it. Love.
I intend to read The Altar of The Only World in other ways too — I want to read it to a friend who is nursing a broken heart, send it to a friend who wants to crawl out of an abyss, leave it in a temple, hide it in a chest, and read it along with a friend who wouldn’t cure my feverish love with cynicism.
Above all, I wish to treat the book like it’s a soothsayer. I want to walk to my bookshelf, pick up the book, open a page, and receive my word. Bibliomancy.
bankrupt_bookworm's review
4.0
"In the French Quarter I wrote you
love poems in yellow ochre,
unscrolled them like a trellis
of bougainvillea, paper
petals too intense to abandon,
too fragile to keep. How many
shots of thirty rupee citrus vodka
could we get for a ten dollar
bill? Everywhere we went you
told them to keep the change,
placing it palm-down back on
the table, so when I picked up
your hand to kiss it after, I
smelt metal on your skin."
.
.
RATING: 4.5/5
I will be honest. Apart from the good reviews, a major reason why I purchased this book last year was because of its stunning cover - it's a naked hardback. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I actually came to admire the poems in the collection. If the title and the cover art of this were not indications enough, the book deals heavily with themes of mythology, legend and mysticism. The pieces employ language in novel ways to develop startling images. Knowledge of myths would of course help to make sense of the more esoteric references, but the poems can be very easily enjoyed without it also. It is again another great example of how poetry is being used to produce distinctly South Asian, or Indian, works of Literature.
.
.
Manivanan asserts that how because of longing, she almost died and how because of language she lived. It's a refreshing collection to say the least mostly because of the completely unique connections that are made through normal words. She merges the everyday life with extraordinary phenomena, the mundane with the epic and the personal with the universal. Her poems explore grief, love and longing through the usage of folklore. Stories form the background against which one's humanness is set. The grey areas of existence are put at the forefront in a bid to portray how we lead highly complex and contrary lives, battling with contradictions daily. Manivanan is a rising talent surely. I for one cannot wait to read her short story collection and recently published debut novel.
love poems in yellow ochre,
unscrolled them like a trellis
of bougainvillea, paper
petals too intense to abandon,
too fragile to keep. How many
shots of thirty rupee citrus vodka
could we get for a ten dollar
bill? Everywhere we went you
told them to keep the change,
placing it palm-down back on
the table, so when I picked up
your hand to kiss it after, I
smelt metal on your skin."
.
.
RATING: 4.5/5
I will be honest. Apart from the good reviews, a major reason why I purchased this book last year was because of its stunning cover - it's a naked hardback. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I actually came to admire the poems in the collection. If the title and the cover art of this were not indications enough, the book deals heavily with themes of mythology, legend and mysticism. The pieces employ language in novel ways to develop startling images. Knowledge of myths would of course help to make sense of the more esoteric references, but the poems can be very easily enjoyed without it also. It is again another great example of how poetry is being used to produce distinctly South Asian, or Indian, works of Literature.
.
.
Manivanan asserts that how because of longing, she almost died and how because of language she lived. It's a refreshing collection to say the least mostly because of the completely unique connections that are made through normal words. She merges the everyday life with extraordinary phenomena, the mundane with the epic and the personal with the universal. Her poems explore grief, love and longing through the usage of folklore. Stories form the background against which one's humanness is set. The grey areas of existence are put at the forefront in a bid to portray how we lead highly complex and contrary lives, battling with contradictions daily. Manivanan is a rising talent surely. I for one cannot wait to read her short story collection and recently published debut novel.
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