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Dino Mahoney, poet, playwright and critic, in Asian Review of Books
Mani Rao's new book of poetry, 'echolocation' is full of the most surprising collocations - juxtapositions of the poetic and prosaic, of the half expected and the unexpected, of close up and distance, of passion and reserve.
She is a dab hand at enjambment - the line that moves across the page then takes a step down to continue moving along the second line.
‘Arranged again in parallel lines, my bare feet face the door, welcoming
the
railroad of time space.’
Or sentences will come to an end and another will start up compulsively on the same line.
‘The days hatch around you feed their hurried mouths. The years open like doors and one by one they shut behind you; some softly, some bang shut.’
Yet the poems are often short. This mix of long lines and short poems brings a density to the verse.
The poetry is often personal and to a certain extent overlaps with the genre of 'feminist confessional poetry'. Many poems are predicated on the personal pronoun, either the 'I', or the objectified 'She' or 'You' of the poet, or the 'We' and 'Our', of the poet and her lover. Yet the poems lack the kitchen sink revelations of confessional poetry - they are often confessional in an abstract, interior way, they are sketches of a inner life, fragments of a sometimes tortured interior world that leave the reader to fill in the wider picture for themselves. Even the first poem in the collection, one of the more direct poems where the poet allows her raw emotions to break the often unruffled surface of her verse - a tone of real bitterness breaks through here. But the full impact, the violence, is mitigated by objectifying her experience into the second and third person - 'She' and 'You'. This objectified passion is reminiscent of the Chinese playwright Gao Xinjiang and this poem has the same dramatic potential for live reading:
' The demon and the dog whirl in space, the knives are out, flashing, and shame.
She makes you eat spit and he who gives you shelter is already a refugee.
She is a carrier for screams fortified with use and he has lost his fuck.
Everyone is innocent, contagious.'
The monosyllabic punchiness of the lines bring out the violence of the lovers' fight.
It is personal and violent yet held at arms length, as though the poet were talking about another woman, another couple.
Yet, in another poem, when the poet writes in the first person, the effect is less immediate. It is as if she reserves the third and second persons for the more dangerous moments and can talk in the 'I' when it is safer to do so.
‘Six years to ask what really happened? Eight years, to read from each other’s bookshelves. Ten swearing lies we occupied and found truth had never been.
We followed the lay of the land to easier and easier positions. My secrets laid with traps, larva clusters of breathing tunnels, diaries that talk back only to me.
Your face, an only reference, guessing the distances in its bent map and hieroglyphic skin.’
Here the confessionality has an opaque element, it has lost its drama, the poet is addressing herself, there is a diary feel to the poem, a meditation on a relationship. This opaqueness comes from the piling up of metaphors ending with the superb image of searching for direction in the bent map’ of her lover'’s face.
A cool, taut surface stretches over a troubled inner world. Yet there is never an appeal for pity, instead there is an ironic curiosity, no matter how painful or strange, the poet is somehow fascinated by everything that is happening to her. It is as if her life were like a distant planet that she views through a powerful telescope - both very close and very distant at the same time:
‘Arranged again in parallel lines, my bare feet face the door, welcoming the railroad of time space.
But death is not interested when I am.
I wake up like a dancer into a rehearsed, familiar position. The boatman has vanished leaving the oars and I am inflating unstoppably into my hollows - shoes, clothes, pen,’
Rao gets close to violence and death even, but as in the first line of the following poem, the hysteria is in counterpoint with long lines that seem always to fall as they end rather than to rise hysterically:
For lipstick she used a razor, a bloom in slow-mo, her mouth a widening blur.
Blood smells of blood, recognize it. The fumes bring in dogs off the street, begging for a kiss. My heart is smeared all over her lips.
Transparent as a ruby, bright enough to wear, painted in your blood, I’m your new baby.
The tide in your veins is a longwinded narrative walking us to where we began.
Faster, finite, using up the beats.
I pluck the corollas for the red dew. The exhalations. Pearls.
It is always midsummer. The smell of death is also the smell of birth.’
Her poems explore identity, highlight a schizophrenia - a state often explored in feminist poetry:
‘I leave myself in the terrace and go downstairs. I leave myself in the living room and go to the kitchen.
I get together sometimes, a hall of mirrors, swearing different stories, playing you-know-that-I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know.
They are all true, some the truths you know, some you don't.
You look for too much explanation.
I can go back to fetch a better memory. And I can recur if you wish.’
Here Rao's tone is deliberately submissive and there is a hint of irony in this, a playfulness that is one of the layers found in her poetry, but often just below the surface as in:
Back from the markets of lust, haven’t bought anything.
Rao's poetry is experimental and almost anti-poetic in form. Yet within this framework she can use classic poetic devices such as personification, as she does in the poem below with an effective personification of the wind with its ‘long arm reaching down chimneys,’
Gust fist.
Pulp pip comet on cladding.
Ripping birdmast, making straw from nest, eggs to liquid gold parabolic orbits.
The long arm of wind reaches down chimneys, runs fingers through silk ash, finds a page of writing inscribed in fire, reads, re-reads.
What holds up the house of cards? Held breath of morning.
And she can explore the world of the senses capturing an audio world with oblique originality in a list of starling images and juxtapositions that are somehow played down in their prose like setting:
‘Listen, and hear the dog listen, geese blaring as they turn, people saying goodbye, eyes closing as they kiss, thinking of others; keychimes folding into pockets, the rip of tyres parting from tar.’
In this volume Rao shows an increased assurance with the poetic forms she has been experimenting with - into her hard, clear Perspex Pandora boxes she pours pain, paradox, playfulness and ironic curiosity and through the clear walls we can see the unsettling consequences of opening the lids.