Review of Ranu Uniyal's "This Could Be a Love Poem for You"

This Could be a Love Poem for You

By Ranu Uniyal

Published by Red River, 2024

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0DS8T59VR

Price: 300 INR

Language : ‎English, pp.91

Can we learn to let go of our own grief? Can we learn to forget about grief, knowing it exists beneath and underneath, beside and alongside our bodies, less tractable and a lot intractable? What binds together the poems of Ranu Uniyal’s This Could Be a Love Poem For You is grief that at times has the pull of gravity that keeps us on the ground and the push of the buoyant force that eventually goes away, but together with it swallows us even as we are afloat. It is the seeping and sweeping nature of grief that for the poet is “beyond shelf life” and “outlives us all”(31). Grief is both sticky and fleeting, but it is also an ingredient for writing poetry:

“Pour it on paper it becomes an elegy, share it with your bed it becomes yours forever.” (38)

In addition to the weight of grief, the fragility that comes with ageing increases the vulnerabilities present in the poems. Grief coupled with ageing occupies a central theme in the poem and often attacks the romantic overestimate of the two. Not just the physical vulnerability that age brings but also the psychological that it attacks. The

“pyramids of memory stacked inside the brain [that] might soon dissolve into Alzheimer’s”

makes the poet dread that her name would too be lost in the oblivion that drives her writing. (25) Even though grief does never age, in the moments overpowering with depressive bouts, the writer also dusts her regrets associated with age and still clings to life.

Between depression, vulnerability, and fragility, there also are poems that speak of the political. The poem "English in Me" that the collection begins with comments on the English in her that has often been ridiculed for existing alongside her Sanskrit accent. English drifts through her as both a reminder of her longing and belonging. The second section marks a departure from the first in that it takes an overtly political tone with gender placed at the heart of it. The poem "Be a Good Girl" speaks of irony embedded in given gender roles—the tension between embodying and defying the idea of a 'good girl' lingers throughout. “Good girls are hanged, dumped, shot…and yet they say be a good girl” (59), writes the poet aching with the same pain as that in Alok Dhanwa’s Bhagi Hui Ladkiyan and Shailja Tripathi’s Yaad Rakhna.

What begins as a rendering of life's fragility in the first two sections deepens into a full weight of loss in the final section, Thy Eternal Grace. Memories of the loved ones lost cling to the body as ‘You remember more of what is no more,’ says Uniyal (78). Even as the collection renders grief, loss, politics into lyrics, it employs words that the readers touch, feel, and smell as they flip through the pages with occasional painting that adapts to the mood of the poems.

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About the Reviewer

Aman Nawaz teaches English at Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University.