Photos of the book launch

A Slice of Life - book review

Khurshid Alam, the chief editor of CLRI, sent me the PDF of Jayanta Ray's book titled A Slice of Life and asked me to review it, which I did and it's now in the March 2014 issue of CLRI. Here's the link:

http://www.contemporaryliteraryreviewindia.com/2014/03/vinita-agarwal-reviews-jayanta-rays.html

Case for recruitment of women in the armed forces : my article in DSA

A Fabulous review of Words Not Spoken by Shernaz Wadia

Every word I've written has become worth it's while because readers like Shernaz Wadia have read it with so much empathy and discernment. Shernaz's review satiates me with her deep understanding of poetry. I treasure the review like a precious gem dear Shernaz...and simply cannot thank you enough. Never enough.

Please follow this link to read the review or read it right here!

http://epaper.thehansindia.com/PUBLICATIONS/THEHANSINDIA/THI/2014/03/09/ArticleHtmls/REVIEW-Words-Better-Spoken-09032014143018.shtml?Mode=1

BOOK REVIEW

Vinita Agrawal

Words Not Spoken

Publisher: Gayatri Majumdar

BrownCritique – Sampark

ISBN 978-81-926842-2-2

Pages -121 Price: Rs. 125/-

. “In the way you hear the sea in a conch shell, if you press your ear against a work of art, you can overhear the artist’s spirit, tossing and turning...” says Yahia Lababidi.

That is what we hear when we listen closely to the poems in Words Not Spoken– the churning of the restless sea of a compassionate spirit speaking through the finest poetry anthology I have read in recent times

As stated on the back cover page, Vinita Agrawal is a Gold Medalist in M. A. Political Science. She has worked as a freelance writer and researcher butremains a poet at heart. The cover design by Sunanda Roy Chowdhury, speaks for itself.

Vinita is a creatively inventive poet. Similes, distinctive metaphors spring with invigorating regularity and alliteration-peppered poems in impeccable language spread like the warm, welcoming aroma of freshly brewed tea on a wintrymorning. Masterful word-strokes entwine colours, imagery, emotions, philosophy,a deep, empathetic understanding of human dilemma and environmental concern into a priceless, exquisite tapestry that is not just delightful in its poetic excellence but is also enigmatically elevating in the vast canvas it explores.

She seeks the sublime in the mundane; examines death, illness, loss, betrayal –the universal human occurrences with insightful reflections and independent thought. Her poems foray into compassion and suffering, humanity and interconnectedness, breath and stillness, heartaches and happiness, womanhood and its travails,  pain and patience, with powerfully carved images.The words not spoken in this collection become dark, haunting shadows in the spaces between her words, taking the uttered words onto a different dimension.Her poems make you prickle or be attentively silent; they can make you smile or cry; they provoke and prod.

She can deal with the vulnerabilities of others because she has examined and mulled over her own. Magnified under her disturbed gaze, everyday occurrences take on a new significance. Words spring to graceful dignity. Articulation is in step as she connects the dots of internalised experience and exhales it in poemsthat glint with witnessing awareness, probably sharpened by her deep involvement with Buddhism.

Her sensitivity to the woes of “the slant-eyed fair maidens”, leaf-pluckers of thetea gardens of Darjeeling, redefines our perception and shakes off our torpor faster than the tang of that morning ‘cuppa’ can, in the first poem “Oolong, Orange Pekoe or Darjeeling”.

Sometimes

their wayward pain rises like steam

and sears our lips

as we sip the brews delicately

from gold-rimmed china cups.

“The Logo of Being” and “Coffee, Tea and Rebirth” are inspired by her Buddhist learning and leaning.

A little badge of life pruned and polished

so that not a single breath of life is out of place

or out of count...and I am born again

after the night has passed. (The Logo of Being)

In “The Light Maker”, we are told

Buddha – the enlightened one...lives in all of us

fold yourself inwards – as fine and deep as you can go

to reach the light-maker in you.

‘If you have a mother, cherish her with care/For you will not know her value till you see her empty chair.’ The veracity of this age-old quote, her pain at personalbereavement and the universal regret experienced when a dear one (particularly a mother) is no more, are achingly distilled in the title poem “Words Not Spoken”. 

Brokenness stood on the spindly legs of a

yawning regret of words not spoken. Love not

expressed, miasma not cleared.

We are sucked, empathetically into the vortex of the poet’s anguish, as shemournfully laments words left unarticulated when her mother was alive -  

“ Scabrous conscience aches 

for the words not spoken.”

Rhythmic emotions and melodic dreams come fascinatingly alive in a clutch of poems like “The Image and the Form”, “Some Day”, “Whispers of Time” and“Consecration”

Fill me too

with spools of kind voices embossed with warmth

and cubes of coloured emotions,

One for every cell.

Bring me alive

so that I may hear

and answer. (Consecration)

The extremely penitent daughter becomes an appreciative mother who swells with pride in “A Musician Son”

Once in a while

you,  me and the dog

sit on the terrace in the moonlight

and you brew me a mug of your kind of brilliant coffee

strum the guitar

the music fills the craters of the moon

or is that just my pride?

The lilting cadences of “Think Like a River” provoke the mind as it meanders with“lifting and folding cusecs of time-travelled water, through clefts and chasms...”She says that it is not just H2O. It is “...a ligament of peace, a flag of fluvial pride”and gently cautions - “Think like a river...Save the river”

“Anklets of a Lost Habitat” is another poem that tinkles with musicality. It strums a blue song interspersed with cheerful notes whereas “Time” ticks with its own terrifying beauty in her proficient hands.

Pain, sadness, loneliness and longing are a recurrent theme in many of her poems as she beads agitated ghosts of old memories (“Thoughts”, “Mortakka”,“Monsoon Showers”, “Office”, “Pain”, “Puppet” to name just a few.) She presents her personal experience and also stark realities around her, without morbidity or self-pity, seizing our attention intellectually.

“The Refugees are here” clenches emotion and brings a lump to our throat.

hungry, empty

the refugees are here

only to keep alive the stories of their land

through chapped, charred lips

that dried up kissing loved ones

goodbye”

“A Birthplace but no Memories” and “Bikaner” again convey the throbbingemptiness of being displaced

Without the anchoring thread

of our soil

we are like drifting kites

conquering alien skies;

always aching for “home” (Bikaner)

“Poetry

is my destruction but it might also save me,” says Vinita in “Hangman”.

I don’t know about her but I am positive that the precious jewels in this collection will save the day for those readers tired of wading through heaps of fake gems that often pass off as good poetry.

I am tempted to quote endlessly from this delectable feast for the mind and heart but I will let readers discover the memorable ecstasy of relishing it. I recommend this book to every lover of good poetry.

For The Girl Child

Statistics indicate that the horrific act of female feticide is more prevalent in the states of Rajasthan and Haryana than anywhere else in India.

As I belong Rajasthan and dearly love it topography and people, I feel particularly shameful when I face such a fact. 

I wrote this poem keeping these sentiments in mind. It's been published in the March 2014 issue of Spark , a magazine published from Bangalore, edited jointly by Anupama and Vani.

Both editors are dilligently, hardworking and extremely disciplined with their work. It's no small effort to bring out a journal month after month especially if it's as enriched and diverse as Spark. I love the fact that they theme their monthly issues...that way readers know what to expect when they pick up the magazine.

Thank you Anupama and Vani for always, always publishing my work.

I dedicate this piece to honor the girl child on the occasion of Woman's Day being celebrated on 8th March.

Please follow this link to read the poem in the magazine : 

http://www.sparkthemagazine.com/?p=6768

Another significant review of the book...by Rob Harle

The feb 2014 issue of CLRI has published Rob Harle's splendid review of my book.

I will always remain incredibly grateful to Rob for this extremely meaningful and worthwhile review. Although this is the third review of the book to be published, in fact, it is the first to be written. 

When Rob sent me the review I was deeply touched by his sensitive response to my work...he read my work and sieved the grains from the husk...the mica from the sand...the precious metal from the ore. Thank you Rob for your graciousness and for your remarkable ability to see beyond the obvious!

Incidentally, Rob is an immensely talented, celebrated and award winning poet and artist himself. Please read more about the man himself at www.robharle.com

Here's a link to Rob Harle's review  :

http://www.contemporaryliteraryreviewindia.com/2014/02/bob-harley-reviews-vinita-agrawals.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+contemporaryliteraryreviewindia%2Fljcg+%28Contemporary++Literary+Review+India%29

Please read and leave comments! Thanks! 

First Prize in the Feb 2014 Hour of Writes Contest

I am pleased to share this...

The Ireland based website www.hourofwrites.com invited me to participate in the staging launch of their unique concept of bringing poets together.

The first prompt was to write a poem on To the Lions, where the sentence was juxtaposed against the photo of an endearingly innocent Giraffe

My poem was awarded the First Prize...and I also eagerly await the Trophy Pencil that the site is in the process of making for its winners. 

Here's the poem. I hope you all enjoy reading it. 

http://staging.hourofwrites.com/archive/competition/id/43/highlight/21#highlight

A novel anthology

The subject of this anthology is close to my heart for various reasons. The bond between a father and daughter is one of the most pure and sustaining relation in a world of artificiality and selfishness.

I thought I'd submit to this anthology for these very reasons. I await their response. 

Checkout the details at: 

http://michaelfarry.blogspot.in/2014/02/fathers-and-what-needs-to-be-said.html

The Full Review by Prof. Vishal Bhadani

Words Not Spoken by Vinita Agrawal 

by Prof. Vishal Bhadani  

Words Not Spokenby Vinita Agrawal
2013. Brown Critique - Sampark Book pp. 122 ISBN 978-81-926842-2-2

Aren’t ‘oxymoron’ and ‘irony’ the best of words to make sense of the kind of life we live, today, now, here? At least, that is precisely what Vinita Agrawal voices when rather nostalgically in her poem “Coffee, Tea and Rebirth” :

Of someone who walked into café
And spoke of rebirth off the cuff

There is an astonishing ease with which one can talk of rebirth and karma but talking it “off the cuff” unfolds several layers that we live with: a layer of modernity, one that of middle path (Buddhist so to say!) and at core, a layer of culturally (up)rooted self and denial of the self. Reading Vinita Agrawal’s poetry collection makes one travel through vicissitudes of basic human passions and emotions. As if the poetess has decided to empty her heart at once, (re)calls some of the solemnly suppressed experiences, shared agonies and ardent feelings to carve up the sculpture of her poetry. While reading some of the love poems, one likes to compare them with the ones by Vera Pavlova, one of the finest Russian poetess, who has a distinctive framework of placing love in poetry; simple, direct and sure. For instance, Vinita makes us witness a lover’s/beloved’s on-edge like situation in love:

I am the threshold of love
In my next breath
I shall be yours (106)

How anyone can be so precise about such a delicate experience of love, one is likely wonder! It is here that, perhaps we can measure the volume of love and one’s inadequacy of locating the whereabouts of the self. Being universally felt and talked about, sometime love becomes very naïve and proverbial in poetry, especially when all poets want to write about it. However, how many of them really mean what they write? Poet as a poet of love is way ahead and much better than poet as a philosopher of love. Vinita belongs to the former category poets, have this, for example:

I have scratched the names
Of your children on the walls of my womb.
Have thus quietened my restless heart.
Now if blood spills out of the aortas and valves
Into my eyes, I shall not mind (114)

Passion makes love more authentic human experience or should I say more humane, a worldly concern rather than Platonic and lofty. Beloved’s pursuits of “quietening her heart” are actually very disquietening ones when we imagine the bygone days of her happy-love. Unfulfilled love, in the broadest sense, is a recurring phenomenon throughout the collection which has caused expressions with stringent agony:

When you left,
I bolted the door
Of my soul from inside
And trapped poetry within me.
Stripped to the bones,
My poems would still smell a few;
Flashed full
They would gibber about you. (84-85)

Now the poet and beloved get immersed; on one hand we have beloved’s soul piercing experience of love—to the extent that soul has to be “bolted” from inside--, we have a happy trap of poetry—the only healing entity on the other. There seems to be a unique triangle of lost love, grief and poetry: your nightingale cannot voice your grief without poetry, poetry would scratch the wounds of lost love and simultaneously cure the grief. Sometimes we are up with arms against vulnerability of love in the lap of love but the question is: where is that clear-cut border line which separates the spiritual/real love and material/physical love? Are they two oxymoron or complementary? Here is an attempt to articulate the populist sentiments of love being “purely physical”:

Tonight I shall invite your embrace
Because even I want to know
What it’s like to spend
A purely physical night (95)

Apart from these many poems, there are some love poems which are “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” only. Nevertheless, the culmination love-poems is A Trilogy of Love Poems at the end the collections; when you read the trio, your response would be reduced to a few interjections. Along with love, time as a priori floats across the collection. Poetess loves to philosophies, talk to and interrogate much cared element called ‘time’. As the following poem unfolds:

Time is the warp of waiting
That dries up the fluid from the knees
And hope from the heart
Souls depart but the waiting stays
Like ivy on the steps of an ancient temples
Time at its worst
Is the empty room and doorway of a house
In which an old man lives silently
Waiting only for death (30)

Numerous writers and poets have considered ‘waiting’ being the most difficult form of time to face; it is only when one waits, one confronts infinity of time and tangible hopes. Here time is metamorphosed as ‘space’ when it becomes “empty room and doorway of a house”. Not all have such experience of being one with ‘waiting’, ‘emptiness’ and ‘silence’. It is an inevitable solitude gifted to poets, lost-lovers and philosophers, I believe.

There are two recurring images; loss of mother and nostalgia of home left which are in fact two colours of time experienced. Here experience of missing mother and the home eats away poetess like acid when she is articulating the regrets:

Brokenness stood on the spindly legs of a
Yawning regrets of words not spoken (19)

No one expresses so well the pain of loss of a mother than a poet; because every time you read such poems, you are transformed to that one unavoidable moment when you had actually lost your mother. Vinita knows the how to play symphony of agony by not bursting into tears and yet crying:

Goodbyes are about emptiness
Now someone else owns this house
But the hearth that holds it is still mine.
I beg its walls for one last hug
And ask them one last question;
Is there anymore lovemaking left in its rooms? (61)

Sense of owning the house is one of the most bosom feelings of modern individuals both materially and immaterially. Here, it is not just missing the home but actually an urge to capture the last experience of being with/in the house so loved and treasured, and while doing so immortalizing the ‘love’ in some happy corners of the heart. The canvas of meaningful poetic creation is incomplete without addressing the most fundamental issue—of being. Western philosophers keep reiterating nihilistic and existential notions of existence but when poets express their views on ‘being’, they do so quietly and metaphorically. Vinita puts across:

The mirror was hardest to clean
For it had reflections
That wouldn’t settle…
They fleeted away
Before they could be erased (34)

It is certainly difficult and challenging to face the ‘self’ in the mirror, especially when you have philosophical or spiritual or poetic bent of mind. As mirror bifurcates our ‘being’ into what we think we are and what we want others to believe in what we really are. Perhaps, it is precisely why “mirror was (is) hardest to clean” for one is conscious of the reciprocal questions of the self and the reflection; the dialogue through mirror sometimes transcend reality per se and we are likely to forget the difference between illusion and reality.

Of course there are various other issues that Vinita engages with like modern life, nature, communalism, nostalgia of Rajsthan, relationship to name a few. It is said literature-poetry is all about what could have been situations of life, one of the most beautiful expressions that I find in entire collection is:

If roofs didn’t exist,
The walls would tell a different story

It is proverbially so pleasing and it indicates chances of what otherwise life could be. You will find more beautiful pearls when you dive deep into the world of Words Not Spoken and Better Spoken!

13-Feb-2014 More by :  Prof. Vishal Bhadani   Views: 62

Thank you Scott for your wonderful comments on my work and for those insightful validations of my own soul searching. Perspectives govern everything we do and I admire the way you have caught that and much much more in my writing. 
Thank you for stopping by here and leaving your comments.Vinita Agrawal 
02/17/2014Lovely..and so inspiringdinesh
02/17/2014Prof Bhadani's admirable review is right to highlight how knowingly and sensitively in this first class collection Vinita Agrawal takes us on an illuminating journey through the many milestones of life - showing us the potential for depth of experience in every moment life brings us. 

Whether these are sweetest glimpses of love and sublime joy or the inevitable parallel mortal torments of loss, despair and dissatisfaction - each cameo is painted with an honesty and deft touch that sings sweet and true. Without a doubt this is a creative soul who is prepared to be open, to take risks to live life to the full and, in so doing, to find true gold... which she is then driven to share with others. Always ambitious in her reach, not just as a writer but as a passionate and generous human being, for me it is therefore the ever present integrity and bravery of this delightful poet that continues to inspire...

Scott Hastie
02/16/2014Thank you all for kind words about the review. I did what this collection made me do. (Some typo errors have crept in, all apologies for that! )Vishal Bhadani
02/14/2014Thank you for your generous appreciation Rob! It's very kind of you to recommend my book. 

Paul, I hope the book is in your hands soon...so you can uncover the mysteries hidden in the snippets provided here. 

Thank you Rob and Paul for reading this review and leaving comments.

All credit of course to Vishal!

Vinita Agrawal 
02/14/2014This is interesting, inviting, and movingly passionate."If roofs didn’t exist,
The walls would tell a different story " This is profound and so true. I can't wait to uncover the intuitive story inside those pages. It is quite an attention and heart warming review. Congratulations, Vinita!Paul C. Blake
02/14/2014This is an excellent review of an excellent volume of poetry. I think Vishal Bhadani has captured the essence of Vinita Agrawal's poetry beautifully. This is one volume of contemporary poetry which you should add to your collection.Rob Harle
02/14/2014Thank you Vishal for such a wonderful review of my book! Thank you for going into the core of my writing, for capturing and assessing my deepest moods and highlighting whatever you found worthwhile!
Honored by the review!Vinita Agrawal 
02/13/2014

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A mini review of the book at Fox Chase Review

G Emil Reutter does me proud on the prestigious journal Fox Chase Review or FCR.

In a few short but distinct sentences he presents accurate insight into my work and anylses the sensibilities that are at the core of my writing. 

Thank you FCR and thanks G Emil Reutter. I am honored!

Readers may read the review here: 

http://foxchasereview.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/words-not-spoken-by-vinita-agrawal/

Anthology showcased here

Words Not Spoken has been showcased here. Please visit!

http://hookthebook.webs.com/bookinformation