Feminine Duet

Some poems in Smita Agarwal’s Wish-Granting Words have appeared in magazines and Nine Indian Women Poets (OUP)—but now we savour them in a single spine, well-travelled poems that have the fine tenor of a practiced musician. Her concerns include pain, both personal and social, nature observations, and the self-conscious act of writing itself: "My eyes lick them off the page/I chew them, suck the juices/Let the flavours seep in. I am/The dreamer; words, the cocoon /I knit" (The Word-Worker).

After Anita Nair’s fiction, The Better Man and Ladies Coupé, comes Malabar Mind—which her publisher’s misleading blurb calls "meanwhile-back-to-real-life-school-of-poetry". Her poetry is infinitely better, more wide-ranging and acutely observed than this. We travel The Highway(s) of Nair’s mind/land/scapes to Brindavan, experience the subtle Happenings on the London Underground, listen to An Ostrich’s Love Song along with a host of other characters, as "sunshine, grass and sly desires" inhabit Hello Lust.