Kiran Bhat
Eartha is Vinita Agrawal’s latest poetry collection, a compilation of poems written in protest against the current state of Planet Earth—melting glaciers, people losing their livelihoods, species on the brink of extinction. The poems range from the utterly personal, such as ‘Chiffchaff’s Song,’ in which Agrawal is entranced by a chiffchaff on her son’s wedding day, to the indubitably political, with poems like ‘The Central Asian Flyway & the Apricot Farmer of Ladakh’ delving into the work farmers are losing as a result of drought and government negligence. The most compelling poems combine Agrawal’s interest in the unfolding climate disasters, her technical prowess of poetry, and most importantly, her sheer sense of passion for what she is writing about.
From ‘Seasons’:
May this earth never freeze,
Never drown.
May its rivers never dry.
Its fires never destroy.
May the seasons come and go.
May they never linger
May they come and go.
Agrawal’s poems have a strong sense of voice, and coupled with her mastery of the poem form, it is rare for a poem not to impress. In ‘A Splendid Poison Frog,’ for example, Agrawal describes December as a “frosty, flinty, pin-point moment that seals most pull-outs.” The alliterations of “frosty” and “flinty” as well as the play of sounds with “pin-point” and “pull-outs” create a sensation of harshness that foreshadows the melancholic tone of the poem. The following lines summon a visual smorgasbord, describing both the poison frog, a set of paints of a canvas colluding, and the sheer beauty of the diversity of colour.
Did the sun flicker
At your vanishing act?
The way yellow convulses on a colour palette
When mixed with green
Before turning blue.
In ‘For the Earth That’s Losing Itself,’ Agrawal employs the command form (“Write about shrinking spaces/ Write about the colour green/ Write a line of chopped trees/ Write a symphony of broken rings”). The intense second person is employed to put the reader in the place of a writer, and to compel them to consider how they would write against the climate crisis. The pushiness of the poem is interrupted with tense and grim lines of beauty: for example, when Agrawal describes the “wells” of “grandma’s earth” as “Feather-touch hand pumps that sprung fountains” and the jugalbandi of rains and tumescent ponds [writing] about making love.
Sound and image combine and collude to usher in not only a call to action, but a recollection of a memory the reader might not have had.
Poetry is an act of love for Agrawal, and her activism for the environment is an act of love too. She has a message she wishes for all of humanity to listen to, but doesn’t want to command. She wants to use poetry as a form to remind humanity of the preciousness of life on this Earth, and how fleeting it is. And it is in Agrawal’s best poems that this desire to imprint change through her writing shines through. Just listen to the lines of the short and powerful poem, ‘This is What I Want.’
I want water
On this earth and in my glass
On children’s lips
Who trudge endless miles on desert sand
Slending only parched voices to their lessons
I want rice
On this earth and on my plate
In the little child’s bowl
Who sits naked outside a mud hut
Crying spasmodically of hunger
I want air
On this earth and in my lungs
In a newborn’s first cry
Let Carbon dioxide not be his cradle
Or Carbon monoxide his first caress
I want an environment
On this earth and in my space
Teeming with birds and animals
Every species, every kind
A planet ruled by love
This is all I want.
Agrawal has written many poetry collections before, but Eartha is the poet at her most coherent, focused, and piercing. These poems not only request, but require the reader to consider the consciousness of the Earth and its waning pulse. It is a poetry collection that deserves to be required reading for any concerned citizen of the planet, and for anyone who is excited and intrigued by the growing library of globally conscious works of literature.
Eartha can be purchased here.
Kiran Bhat is an Indian-American author, traveller, and polyglot. He is known as the author of we of the forsaken world…, but has published books in five different languages, and has had his writing published in journals, such as The Caravan, Outlook India, Sahitya Akademi, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, 3:AM Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, SOFTBLOW, and many other places. He has been to 177 countries, lived in 25 cities in the world, and speaks 12 languages, but currently lives in Mumbai, where he is currently the co-chair of the Environmental Sustainability Subcommittee of the Global Indian Council. IG: originalsin_421; Twitter and Facebook: WeltgeistKiran
Featured photo by Vinita Agrawal
