I have spent longer than usual writing a review for Eartha, Vinita Agrawal’s latest book of ecological poetry. Why is that, I ask myself. I love the poems, they resonate, I agree with so much of that which is being said and yet I’m finding it really hard to write this. Again, I ask myself, why is that? And after another full day of going through the manuscript with the proverbial toothcomb, thinking about what messages the poems hold for me, trying to pick up clues from the rustle of the wind in the pines and the leaves of the apple trees, full green for miles around, realization dawns.
For Agrawal’s poems are beautiful, painful, revelatory and sometimes, just too sad for words. It is this sheer force of tragedy that has made it hard for me to critique Eartha. Sometimes the truth is difficult to bear.
The voice of nature
Eartha’s endpaper, a singularly arresting illustration from the 2nd century AD depicts three soothsayers interpreting Queen Maya’s dream of birthing Buddha. A scribe is recording the details of this dream. It is perhaps, the author tells us, the earliest available pictorial evidence of the written word in India. This is significant, given the potency ascribed to grafting the hitherto unspoken, the voice…
Source: ‘Eartha’: Poet Vinita Agrawal converses with all sentient beings on the planet
