Basudhara Roy’s darkly magical immersion into the aching heart of stasis turns into surreally sensorial music in her new collection entitled A Blur of a Woman. A raw, ravenous hunger drives the poems, using an audaciously wild biosemiotic vernacular in an effort ostensibly, to enable a radical spiritualism in the context of a post-anthropocene setting. Basudhara stages a provocative intervention into the pschyodynamics of functional illusions and convenient fictions that operate our perceptions, choices, and actions. An elemental corporeality fuels her expressive rhythms like a collective subaltern sigh made powerfully audible. Her uniquely poignant aesthetics reveal her as a gnostic emissary - one who steps into the white-hot silence of epiphany, poised searingly between matter and metaphor, perhaps holding a secret to transcending disappearance.

A dynamic stillness pervades the opening poems, as semantic superficialities melt away into a fluid tangle of signifiers liquifying into riverine tears, beginning with the opening poem Duhkha. Lingua poetica goes to the heart of identity, as a disembodied narrator plumbs primordial depths in This Dark House, finding celestial formations heavy with visceral resonance:

Perched like a pendant
on the dark’s clavicle
is an immense moon.

The mythological frame of apocalypse drapes World’s End as the collapse/renewal conundrum vibrates with imagistic intensity. Discovery is an inside job, we find, and it involves being “soluble in the dark.” Traveling through the metaphysical river of time, the poet discovers a luminous continuum in Love Style Columbus, where she can forge a cartography of poems on ancient, still fertile palimpsests. From these chimerical wanderings, Basudhara then careens into the depths of existential paralysis, exposing the limits of experiential spirituality as a sense-making tool in Choosing God:

In a land of faith, gods run pell-mell
seeking refuge.

 

The interrogatory mode continues in Plotting a Dream, its speculations becoming a searing ode to the beauty and mystery of terrestrial idiom:

Does a dream, like lichen, flourish in moist and dark?
 

The poems flow into liminal terrain, as the flesh “is wooed to raptures/by a single spell of rain” in Unknotting. Dialogic lyricism in On Reading Shahid envisions how “roses are rising from ashes.” Planted abandons socially designated personhood, and goes into the soul of ontological essence by sensing love’s presence within seeds whose “minuscule hearts of darkness” release “widening wildernesses of light.” Neural mining stirs up a web of curdling selves somatically entrenched in the trembles of memory in Soka: A Triptych, which details violent loss and a haunted glimpse at “life’s invisible twin.”

 

Drawing from a vault of the unspeakable, a raging elegy emerges, retrieving artifacts of impermanence from a sensory warp in which memoir, history, and myth form a mercurial medley.” Kali walks nude” (Exorcised), as we find “faith hanging limp/like an overcoat in the summer dark” (Rehabilitation), or we get blinded by the “rudeness of light” (Chores). From private fiefdoms to public sociopolitical fissures - it’s all furiously subliminal in Basudhara’s personal morphogenesis in Swapped, where the metacritic in her explodes into a radical new self, unleashing the trapped energies of her id:

 

We have swapped histories. I have broken into her name,

put my voice through a sieve, even painted my brittle nails.

This night I will effortlessly preside over his love in memory

as she vacuum-cleans the sofa, powders nutmeg, and does his laundry.

 

Moving from expressionist rigor to evocative particularity, the poems subvert artistic paradigms in their blending of the tactile, the sonic, and the imaginary. Out of a blur, women take shape from the inadvertent voyeurism of their own yearning gaze. We find an “uncombed mind” in Woman at Twilight trying to find coherence in “rinsing her day.” Lalita Speaks features a “heart-throb” god’s flute drawing out latent desires of blissed out partners, but the vintage patina of his famed amorous powers is then peeled away. Feminine “soul-script” blossoms in ecstatic interlocking of “sandal-rubbed arms” as mesmerised women secretly whirl to the forbidden joy of love that is “recklessly returned.” This Body’s Country reveals solitude in every“dreaming tissue,” not as a passive state, but as a dynamic medium which lifts the veil of “tender sleep that yawns softly beside death.”

Basudhara’s compositional versatility assumes a radical use in Re-(pre)sent-a-tion/s - a creatively ambitious feat of linguistic ingenuity using grammatical insertions and parentheses. These collectively form a piercing counterpoint to conventional feminist diatribes. We see instead, a sublimation of outrage, a rebellion against language that is exclusionary and sexist, all through a litany of imagistic gestures. This gets particularly moving when a note of weary resignation creeps in at the “graffiti on history’s hall of shame.”

While her expression is intellectually alluring, though emotionally stark, it is Basudhara’s unique conceptual artistry that arrests the attention as it unabashedly embraces ambivalence. The Woman and the Sea is a forcefield of heaving tides and brewing storms: a “letter on last night’s land.” Ecological mindfulness would have let us recognize that the “sea is a woman” - her symbiotic dance having the power cyclically return to the scene of atrophy and decay, to inhabit loss, and yet retain her insurgent instincts. Vibrant dissonance marks the avant-garde energy of her kinetic vistas in poems dramatically different in their exploratory tonality. Post-Philomela and On Women against Women go for the jugular in their take down of archaic power structures using the “blade of language” to challenge a rigid patriarchy that has used religion to have them “deified and defiled.”

 

Virgo Intacta is a passionately suggestive call to former selves who consort with soulmates that have yet to manifest into physicality. In a hyper urban, digitally mediated world, enjambment is a fitting idiom for this edgy poem which confrontationally addresses a partner speaking of a time to “arrive to a place /where you and I have never met.”

The collection’s signature poem A Blur of a Woman unveils a muse cavorting in the heart of absence, a womanly quintessence that lives beyond the temporal realm with her wild kin. “She is rumour sliding down the grapevine” - such dimensional ruminations defy essentialist categories with archetypal trickster energy! Her seductive rendezvous with visionary experience lies in her “one foothold of land.” Even as this poem archives trauma in expressions such as “her body a sickle bending to your duty,” it brings on an unexpected redemptive stirring within a receiving reader. The confessional tone does not signal subservience, rather it gives a middle finger to normative biases and sociosexual conventions with its bold epistemological upending of consensually constructed reality. The aspirational “unbuilding” at the poem’s end eschews apocalyptically futuristic cosmic fanfare. Its trope of woman as blur has the sense of a polyphonic musical meditation, a numinous physicality, a sensual serenade, a mirror of dew in a mystic’s gaze. This poem rises like plumes of bated breath: a rhapsodic dream temple in the desert of time. The bone marrow of a Basudhara lyric lies in the monastery of consciousness, a brain space where seeing happens fiercely, vitally, and tenderly. Her physicalist ontology has metaphysical bearing because it breaks the intellectual habit of literal entrapments, as it bursts forth in synesthetic grandeur against the powerful currents of cultural rigidity.

 

Basudhara’s world view is not servile to the male representation of it. Her digs at biological essentialism assume a cognitively agile and provocatively subversive approach as she aligns her creative inner life to her own truth and modes of knowing in poems such as The Last Laugh. The dialectic between privilege and victimhood becomes an architecture of segregation within relationships, where power can manipulate fact. A woman then uses her active silence to denounce the cultural patronage of these attitudes:

 

The woman always finds a door.

The man always thinks

what a fool she is.

Time always has the last laugh.

 

A glorious treat arises from the tactile ether of Basudhara’s pages in the form of celestial recipes for terrestrial being. She presents to us a series of jazz-toned ghazals parsed with fervor, flourish, and the aesthetics of shadow light. Like quantum constellations these songs spring from the poet’s witnessing gaze. Ranging from ecophilosophical to metaphorically suggestive, they contain within their sonic bandwidth a diatribe against ossified templates of patriarchal thought, and augment our perception with introspective sophistication. Water Ghazal features a moral whiplash where Ganga “could not keep the sons she birthed /a man -god had ordained this escheat of water.” Viscerally haunting, A Ghazal Tonight chills us with its aphoristic force:
 

Last survivor I haunt this valley of faith.

Tell me whose trust I shall betray tonight?

 

With rakish charm and charismatic fluency, Basudhara pierces the delirium induced by imperious repression, and peppers her bold trespass into the cultural conversation with  a quirky activism, as in A Ghazal in Me, where she fills in the cracks in her own thoughts: “I shall hear shrill embers of sea scheme in me.” Hydrodynamics pervade this series of poems, seemingly to wash away the jargon of encroachment by melting their frozen grip, and releasing power from the raw material of language. In Ghazal of Necessity, Basudhara’s virtuosic imaginings animate the inner habitat of silence and reveals a vibrant ecology brewing within:

 

The soul’s intractable soil calms with pain.

Grudge not my life this scar of necessity.

 

Using words that brim with tactile energy, by grazing the undulations of consciousness like a lover, Basudhara is guided by the promise of serendipity, with her ear to a cosmic metronome. All this while still furiously anchored in the present - she casts blinking light on the lethal polarizations that afflict our professed pieties in Ghazal of the Body, as their carnage manifests from womb to tomb:

Martyrs reminds us how every time
Divinity dies in the profane of the body.

The mood shifts in a kinetic flutter as we witness the metabolic wizardry of “gnawing hunger” in Pica. The tongue’s “ripe ache is for red” on a day that the poet sneaks past the borders of language, and becomes a migrant in a land of “flavor lost” - a mystical frontier that is a dark archive from which “there is no retrieval.”

 

The astonishing range of Basudhara’s melodic contours and sculptural sounds is evident in the complex ontologies she uses to expose epistemological upheaval. Six Ways to Kill a Poem crosses over the edge of semantic certitudes, and uses image as verb to “rake the truth”. The commodity fetish plaguing cultures, particularly the normative taxonomy of sexuality is systematically attacked by tracing the cartography of violence towards women, starting at the pre-birth stage. The propulsive energy of the outrage that drives her reverberates in the sections entitled Foeticide, Ostracise, Violate, Delegitimise, Lynch, Send Missing, and Caution.

The unpalatable revelations of today’s zeitgeist reveal to us that fakery, crass populism, ideological straitjacketing have systematically colonized the mind. This has resulted in reductive mechanistic materialism that has often turned contemporary discourse into incendiary idiocy. Basudhara seeks a deeper ground of meaning within the constraints of this ethically unsettling, predatory ambiance with her spiritually informed pluralistic impulse. Praise for the Subaltern and Dis/enfranchised toss cognitive pathogens to the howling wilderness of aural emptiness. Her powerful narrative voice scavenges “upon the world’s memory” and travels “well-disguised” - implying faith in a community of silent witnesses. Vernacular transcriptions present a Coconut Laddu as “prasaad” - its recipe tellingly comprising broken heart fragments. The “tremor of bones” reflects existential distress of a body that cannot name itself in the scheme of things in Arousing. An elemental roar orchestrates the geometry of moods that ripple through the musings and mythscapes like baroque variations. And yet, in Things I am Learning from the Sea, a covenant of reciprocity timorously emerges in the poetic impetus of “salt-scraped soul.”

 

Let all who touch you leave their mark

so that in the bewilderedness

of life’s maze a secret passageway

To tomorrow is opened by their wisdom

lit consistently by your faith.

Thanksgiving implores listening hearts to “make this moment a shrine,” and Orison addresses the “raw youth” of the poet’s sons who have to be readied for the storms that will inexorably darken the bright skies of their innocent sentience.

Night, Stalking dedicated to Keki N. Daruwalla concludes the collection in a grainy sepia of “seeds that once/stumbled from your grasp” - a silenced carnival where spectral presences roam the melancholic night, and dissonant music of loss reaches a fevered pitch:

 

Now that you have given

your words to the wind,

newspapers scream

and the night train refuses to run

to find through stars

Passage for misery.

 

The exquisite complexity of Basudhara’s evocations of provisional coherence that holds life in its fragile structure, and her stark stripping of the chronic superficialities that erode its core are presented with astringent candor throughout the poems. Their reverberating lament exposes the nakedly destructive and divisive binarizing that depletes womanhood, the emotional tyranny that breaches its soul, and the hegemonic forces that erase its relevance. This is what gives A Blur of a Woman its anchorage in the heart of rupture. It reads like an agnostic prayer, so resonant is its litany of reparations for the silenced, its transgressive potency, and its sacred activism.