"Every kite forgets its string," writes Amit Majmudar, but the poet has not forgotten the strings that tie him to the women in his life--grandmother, mother, wife, friends, and others who feature in his new collection, Things My Grandmother Said. The kite line comes from the title poem, full of pithy aphorisms expressed in a voice so familiar it could belong to anyone's grandmother:
I wasn't crying, I was dicing onions
in a memory in Ahmedabad.
Sure, the Ganges is holy
but who told you to drink from it?
Love
should be diving board, marriage
should be lap swim.
I like that old lady! I've written before about how skillfully Majmudar plays with voice, language, poetic forms, and images, but in this collection I was frequently struck by line breaks. In the title poem, for instance, the grandmother says this:
This girl is perfect for you, I know
her aunt.
Look at how the line break shifts the function of "I know": in the first line, it indicates a confidence in the girl's perfection; but "I know / her aunt" suggests that the girl's perfection is contingent upon her connections.
Or take a look at the ambiguity encouraged by the second line break below:
What does it mean when the white
man trying to enter me
in a database asks
Sweetie, aren't you hot
under all that
cloth?
These lines appear in "The Migration Diary of Hala Almasi," a long poem dealing with various violations of women's privacy, rights, and bodies. In this context, a man's trying to "enter me" suggests physical violence--but "enter me / in a database" leads to a different type of violence as the veiled migrant from Kabul gets squeezed into a little box on a computer screen. The final stanza plays with permutations of a common phrase to convey the many ways a woman may be denied agency:
The woman undergoes
the marriage. The woman goes under
the man's last name. The woman goes under
the man. The woman undergoes
the parting of the seas so the man
with the staff can enter
her promised land. The woman undergoes
the miscarriage. The woman undergoes
the man's war. The men say they promised
the women nothing. The country
goes under. The men put
the women on a raft and say:
Go. So we go. Some across, some
Under.
Another poem dealing with a woman's pain, "Regeneration," describes a traumatic brain injury:
You shaped and smashed
Your brainstuff flat
On all the scattered
Bits of matter
Gray and white
To piece your anguish
Into language
And write.
"To piece your anguish / Into language" is an apt description of the poet's purpose, especially in a world where, as "Meteorology" insists, humanity seems
Trapped in chaos
country during
chaos season.
"Meteorology" wonders whether the butterfly's flapping wing can affect distant weather or chance encounters can change a life:
One summer day
you see a face
in a coffee shop
and chaos pulls
a fire alarm
deep inside you.
That fire alarm rings in other poems presenting novel images for human connections. "Recourse," for instance, is a lovely sonnet corona dealing with love, time, change, and constancy, in which the ties that bind may be benign or menacing:
I want to weave a crown for you, design
a daisy chain whose threaded stems become
a bracelet that handcuffs your wrist to mine...
And in "Remote Work," a poem decrying the isolation of the perpetually online,
We are kites without strings, strings
desperate to be strummed ...
But how can strings be strummed over the distance imposed by technology?
Another poem, "School of Witchcraft and Wizadry," recalls the loneliness of a schoolboy who feels isolated until someone sees through his invisibility cloak:
One friend is all it takes,
one person to rhyme with the mysterious
magical word you always were.
Together, you're a spell now,
conjuring happiness
with a wand
no bigger than a No. 2 pencil....
A pencil may be a magic wand in a world where anguish becomes language. Among the poems celebrating connections among friends, relatives, lovers, and others, poems exploring grandmother's words, mother love, and Mother Earth, Majmudar concludes the collection by asserting that "We Are All God's Poems":
We are all first drafts, shy in public
and rhythmically iffy. We are all
orphan lines yearning to become
couplets, willing to rhyme slant
if that means we don't have to be alone.
In a volume full of love that survives beyond loss, Majmudar invites us, in "Cat's Cradle," to recall
how beautiful and necessary beings
who give you love can take their love
but keep on cradling you, unseen ...
Yes, the kite may forget its string, but that doesn't erase the unseen strings that are strummed so potently in Things My Grandmother Said.
