I have just read…

I have just read Rajani Radhakrishnan’s new chapbook, The night is my mirror, in which she says, ‘In the long days of isolation and solitude, words were hard to find’. The words she has found resonate with me very clearly; they have been written fluently and with great self-understanding. Her metaphor of poems as pieces of a puzzle demanding to be put together is perfect for this collection.

I love the way each poem is separated by a micro poem, of which one of my favourites is:

‘to know a storm, you should know
a drizzle, to know a drizzle,
you should get lost in the desert’.

One of the poems that spoke directly to my poet’s heart was ‘Things that may not end’, in which she writes:

‘The unfinished poem is my safe place. The map I was
given had no home or river or road — just a cloud-masked
sky hiding stars in frenzied kinesis’
and
‘…an incomplete poem neither travels nor
waits. Its flaws are not bound by linear time or karmic
causality. The final words will come in random sequence,
one unremarkable morning between the mundane and the
rain.’
(I love the internal rhyme ‘mundane/rain’.) 

I also felt each line in ‘Things that cannot’ and ‘Things that are awake’. A beautiful collection. You can read Rajani’s poetry and see her other publications on her website, which you can find here.