‘chronicles of entering my body’ is an exploration of love, grief and relationships through poetry and painting. Rupam Baoni’s striking voice deconstructs notions of emotional and bodily experiences, keeping her examinations in parallel with Nature. This is Rupam’s second collection, featuring poems that have recently been shortlisted in the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing and Bridport Prizes, and longlisted in the National Poetry Competition.
trailer
These thirty poems erupt and dance into our consciousness, sequenced within five chapters – each with one of the author’s own paintings at its mouth: chronicles of entering my body, love is a one-dimensional word, silence is the loudest word, dragon wisdom and vitruvian woman.
Two more paintings accompany the opening and closing content of the book. The title poem, also represented as a chapter title, comes to us with its remarkable lines and questions such as:’I’m made of fire now and you’re wind; but still, tell me the chronicles of your entering my body, tell me how your entering is silent as non-entering in all its entirety’. Such profound and philosophical inquiries continue through the collection along with explorations of the body and the natural world. One’s journey through the work brings encounters with love, manifestations of grief, tightrope walkers, the vulnerability of flesh, dementia, the bonds between mothers and daughters, Beethoven’s symphonies, prayers to the earth and more. The book culminates in a long seven-part poem as the final chapter, ‘vitruvian woman’ inspired by da vinci’s ‘vitruvian man’ and the Indian philosophy of the seven chakras in our body and how each one opens the physical/spiritual doorways to different facets of human needs, desires and understanding before the final passing.
dementia is the gradual impairment of personality integration due to loss of neurons in the brain
the place of no return
doesn’t always have to be death –
death is overrated; I watch my dad
die everyday and
everyday he lights his pyre and
toasts to his histories and geologies of
a lifetime as though he were the last living
remnant of all there was of him; and everyday
he pries open with his bare hands the archives of
an era that give way to more eras before him and
he scoops up in his palms residues of
his loves, the forfeitures of lives lived or
those that weren’t, and he crouches there day after
day upon his cot, fingering the altered maps of
his body and what it is now, or how it will be
so; and his losses tail me across continents and
seek me out, and I live with his shadows bounding
like antelopes that are wounded and left for
dead everywhere; that’s him now, sitting with
himself in company, and that’s him knotting then
unknotting strips or shreds that once strapped his
flesh and bones in place; he rinses off grime from his
hands by the hour as though that were his blood or his
bloodline staining all there is; and often he places his
memories like a montage before him, then all day he
sifts from there the vestiges of what once was
and is now; no,
the place of no return
doesn’t always have to be death –
death is overrated; I watch my mum
sip potions of
his death each day like
sacramental wine and I wonder if
she will return one day from this place of
living where he dies every day
~~
audio
earth song
you draw me close and drink
my nectar, you kiss
my blossom flower-heads, you
enfold my brooks,
my purple falls, my lissom
snow peaks, you
sink into the dark ravines of
my olive forests
my swirling seas, you wield
your love, your primacy
over my flesh, my bones,
my blood. I cannot
be possessed you know. I
take your infinite
seeds into my womb. I
sprout your love to life
~~
audio
pearls
why don’t you and I string
these pearls scattered
on the dressers and floors
of our lemon-peach house?
white, pure, eloquent:
they were nurtured in oysters
deep under water for years
and now they roll and flounce
about the spaces, waiting for
the first needle prick,
the gentle tug, the lissom slither,
to pearl them together
and hang around our necks
like dialogue
we wished to wear forever
~~
audio
praise for chronicles of entering my body
the surfaces of longing. Her poems and paintings possess a dreamy, subterranean momentum.
that inner beauty that exists in all of life. She has the faculty to look below the surface and beyond a
usual line of vision.
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