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A review by wesleysbookshelf
When The Night Agrees To Speak To Me by Ananda Devi
4.0
When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me
By Ananda Devi, translated from the French by Kazim Ali
As Adam Hall once wrote, "Meanwhile, we might also console ourselves with the thought that certain great poems, and great poetries, are not incomprehensible, but inexhaustible."
It has been such a delight to go through this little collection of poems. I took it with me to the garden on a day when my street was loud with festival noises. In that garden, it kept me company through it myriad metaphors. The poems close around you like night, falling with their soft cadences, punctuated by the sounds of birds and far-away laughter.
Ananda Devi's poems bring to us a spectrum of themes: womanhood, sexuality, sensuality, the creeping of old-age, the violence and beauty of living on an island nation. There is joy, and there is anger. Devi's collection talks about the body, particularly the female body, uses it as landscape and metaphor. A metaphor for the glories that encompass the experience of being a woman, a metaphor for what violence does to female bodies.
A prose-poetry piece in this collection also takes us to the island country where children are given guns instead of books, suffering instead of stories. A place that is becoming (like the entire world, apparently) more and more comfortable taking away childhoods.
Towards the end of the collection is an interesting exchange of emails between Ananda Devi and Kazim Ali that lend more insight into her work. A total plus!
In the dexterous and more-than-capable hands of Kazim Ali, we come to these poems. We are held in thrall and they unravel from a series of thirty poems, to pieces of prose-poetry. Poems and pieces that are sparsely punctuated, if at all. The lines run at you and then through you, leaving you changed in some way.
We are given the French version on every even-numbered page, and it's English translation on every odd-numbered page. To hear these poems read out loud by a friend who is fluent in French was a special treat.
I am so glad that I was able to read this collection. My thanks to @vivekisms @harpercollinsin @harperperennial for sending this rich, musical, and all-round lovely collection of poems.
By Ananda Devi, translated from the French by Kazim Ali
As Adam Hall once wrote, "Meanwhile, we might also console ourselves with the thought that certain great poems, and great poetries, are not incomprehensible, but inexhaustible."
It has been such a delight to go through this little collection of poems. I took it with me to the garden on a day when my street was loud with festival noises. In that garden, it kept me company through it myriad metaphors. The poems close around you like night, falling with their soft cadences, punctuated by the sounds of birds and far-away laughter.
Ananda Devi's poems bring to us a spectrum of themes: womanhood, sexuality, sensuality, the creeping of old-age, the violence and beauty of living on an island nation. There is joy, and there is anger. Devi's collection talks about the body, particularly the female body, uses it as landscape and metaphor. A metaphor for the glories that encompass the experience of being a woman, a metaphor for what violence does to female bodies.
A prose-poetry piece in this collection also takes us to the island country where children are given guns instead of books, suffering instead of stories. A place that is becoming (like the entire world, apparently) more and more comfortable taking away childhoods.
Towards the end of the collection is an interesting exchange of emails between Ananda Devi and Kazim Ali that lend more insight into her work. A total plus!
In the dexterous and more-than-capable hands of Kazim Ali, we come to these poems. We are held in thrall and they unravel from a series of thirty poems, to pieces of prose-poetry. Poems and pieces that are sparsely punctuated, if at all. The lines run at you and then through you, leaving you changed in some way.
We are given the French version on every even-numbered page, and it's English translation on every odd-numbered page. To hear these poems read out loud by a friend who is fluent in French was a special treat.
I am so glad that I was able to read this collection. My thanks to @vivekisms @harpercollinsin @harperperennial for sending this rich, musical, and all-round lovely collection of poems.