Much of the poetry celebrated generally is found to be melancholy and, currently, even mechanised in the clutches of the sensitivity-desiccated academics, not forgetting that the most award-winning poems nowadays are not daring to engage in a pursuit of social or political legislation –if I may use Shelley’s words. Usha Kishore’s new poetry collection, Immigrants, just published by Todd Swift and Eyewear Publishing breaks away from this sterile stagnation. This collection also makes a compelling case for a support by all Asians, not only to make it a success and provide an encouragement, but to make a case for the quality literary work offered by diasporic Indian writers and poets. This fascinating work captures reality and metaphors of our dual and simultaneous existence as immigrants through the aspects of icons, symbols, events, spirituality, religion, food, culture, arts, and the adverse political space. Even in the postcoloniality (p11), Kishore spares no shyness in delivering a nature of the beast that holds the Jallianwala Bagh (p23) guns.
However, the pen is also a gun in poet’s hands as described by Seamus Heaney: Between my figure and my thumb / The squat pen rests: snug as a gun. Hence, Kishore also discharges sharp and short lines like bullets.
Your guns thunder down.
I die. But I rise.
Then as a teacher in English, she blasts the hypocrites:
I come. I see. I conquer.
I teach you your language.
While making a narrative for the immigrants, Kishore never forgets that essentially she is a poet, as shown in this powerfully altered image of a Padmavati of the feminist age:
I learnt, piling like firewood
waiting to claim me.
The firewood is a silence waiting to burst out as a fire. This collection is such a silence in words.
