Sunanda Mongia is the author of a collection of short stories, Cryptozones (Writers' Workshop, Calcutta, 1996.) She is also a scholar and critic who has published two books, The Discourse of Anxiety: The Drama of O'Neill, Miller and Williams (Associated Publishing House, New Delhi, 1997), and Brand India: Master Images and Narratives (BR Publishing Corp., New Delhi, 2004). Her translation of Rahul Sanskriyayan's Kinnar Desh Me is forthcoming from The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture/ Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Divided into four sections, Upon My Word intersperses poems on themes of aging, independence (personal and national), and the cycles of death within life; throughout, the collection draws parallels between microcosm and macrocosm-between human and cosmological and geological time -- and does so to great effect.

The nine lyric poems of the first section, "Of Humans Bonded," bring to the foreground epistemological questions that suffuse and contextualize the poems of the subsequent three sections of the book: the nature of loneliness and freedom; the relationship between seemingly timeless astronomical processes and the brevity of human life and experience; the nature of observation. This tension in Upon My Word between cosmological and human time scales creates a poignancy that infuses the collection. In juxtaposing these temporal scales, Mongia creates a mixed tone, one that is both terrified and reassured, as in the poem, "It's Jus' As Well":

In the universe, a tiny galaxy,
In the tiny galaxy, a small sun,
A puny earth, a tiny region of land,
A little patch and in a lifetime
We all stand on it at least once.
Comparing sizes...Saying...Well, now.
Isn't it a consolation? Just think.
It is just as well-
That our emotions, and passions,
Lives and Loves -- we, after all are so small.
What if we were to infect the sun?
Dim the stars? Crumple the moon?
Or indeed, batter, bang, explode
The very heart of the universe
With the force of furies,
Or blow off the lid of the world
With the pain of our ulcers?'
(8)

I quote the poem in its entirety in order to show the way in which it actively keeps open, rather than narrows, the gap between the cosmological and the personal. In so doing, the poem positions the reader between the wonders of astronomical time -- both frightening and oddly consoling -- and the pull of daily life. Inhering in the poetics of Upon My Word is an argument that the reader, like the narrator, occupies a liminal place -- between temporal scales and between narrative consolations. After the terrific (reverse) telescoping of the first five lines of the above poem, the crucial turn comes in line six with the series of rhetorical questions that don't quite offer the consolation they're designed to effect. Thus, in the first section of Upon My Word, the poet uses poems such as this one as well as "I know This One," and "From a Vantage Point in the Milky Way" to establish a poetics in which the process of searching for consolation is perhaps more important than arriving at it.

Eight poems about the artistic process comprise the second section of the collection, "Go Catch a Falling Poem." Mongia compares writing poems to a spiritual search in "The Perfect Dream" and to the intricacies of self-representation in the social world in "My Accessories" and the title poem, "Upon My Word." The strength of the latter poem lies in Mongia's ability to render expectations regarding beauty, particularly western notions of beauty, as problematic and artificial as well as damaging to the creative process. Of her descriptive pieces in the collection, "A Poem's Like a Gathering Storm," is one of the strongest formally, and the conceit of poem-as-storm works well. Here the poet's diction is crisp, and the figurative use of language more precise than in other poems in the book such as "On the Tracks of a Thought Long Gone," in which the comparison between a missed train and the fleeting nature of the creative process is overworked.

The third section of the book, "Profiles," is the longest with eighteen poems. Mongia intersperses evocative political pieces with more intimate poems about aging, motherhood, and the cycles of life and death, and the section, as a whole, is elegiac in tone. The political pieces use narrative rather than didactic language, which is their strength. "Mother India at Fifty" is a somber anniversary poem, and its strength lies in its effort to give figurative resonance to the body of a nation; however, some readers might find the parallel between women's bodies and the body politic problematic. In places, the poem suffers from lack of clarity. It is unclear who is being held responsible for what the poem represents as the decline of the (female) body of India from "youthful innocent mother" to an "old woman left to beg/by her numerous progeny/in the lanes of holy Vrindavan." In the second stanza, the agent(s) of this destruction remain too vague, and this is where the poet loses an opportunity to connect her imagery to a broader political analysis:

And there were other friends
Those who lead her by the nose
A cow sucked dry of her mild and blood.
They return what they took
'Aids, p1480 and terminator genes....'
(27)

One wants to see, for example, a more vigorous engagement with the matrix of problems embodied in the "terminator gene". Even a line or two within this stanza, based on images of the nightmare of "sterile seed technology" (to use the euphemistic phrase of agbiotechnology) would make the lived connection between people and land more realistic in the poem -- a connection that remains largely abstract. This lack of verisimilitude weakens the political impact of the poem and lessens the efficacy of its figurative language as a vehicle for the poet's historical analysis. Another poem in this section, "Flowering Dalits," uses figurative language more persuasively, particularly in the tacit parallel between Eurocentrism and the oppression of dalits in the last half of the poem; however, some readers might be concerned about the poem's representation of dalits as a monolithic group. "Very Much Fine English" is a trenchant satire, and Mongia's poetics, which is primarily narrative, is better suited to satiric political observation:

His, they say, is the best department.
Others may, but he never deviates
from sense. Sensible, wise, worldly so.
The off-track to yawning sagacity
He is the honoured professor of vacuity

Generations he's taught agree
His soul is in Shakuspaer
His mind and heart everywhere.
Inter to M.A. administered as proscribed
In ascending splendour, a blazing surge
Of fine English, very much fine English,
Super fine English and ultimate fine English.
(43-44)

The final section of Upon My Word explores women's power and creative energy and expression, beginning with a meditation on Shakti in "God Delivers the Universe." Mongia alternates poems about the oppression of women with others about women as divine creators from whom all civilizations were born -- across lines of geography, race, and epochs. Mongia ends the collection with an emblematic and witty poem -- a short history of the bra in India as a garment designed to both constrain and liberate women -- that draws on her narrative skills.

The strength of Upon My Word lies primarily in its thematic scope rather than in the formal strata of the poems. The poems in the collection that rely too heavily on vague descriptions of inner states, such as "Balance Sheet," seem belabored at the figurative level. The strongest poems are the descriptive ones in which the poet conveys her ideas in crisp, detailed images. In them, the poet grounds her perceptions in observations of natural or social phenomena, which enables her to convey abstract ideas more effectively. In her narrative bent and a satiric ethos, Mongia creates the foundation for a wide-ranging poetics, which is a mark of success in any first book of poems.

Book Description: A first collection of poetry.
"Even when utterly alone, the self is forever relational, and therefore always looking... at something. At times with the bird's eye view, it looks up to see cosmic origins, at another time it glances down to see the hardened cocoon of the body. And then it sees that there are other meshes, of gender, culture, times, ambitions, or just the greatest restriction of all, the compulsion to communicate, the greatest illusion of our lonely lives." (from the preface to the book).

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