A new collection of poems by a Mumbai-based poet sheds light on the animal world and reminds us of what we stand to lose if we look away
PIC COURTESY/AMAZON INDIA
In her debut poetry collection, They Gather Around Me, The Animals (NFSPS Press), city-based poet Kunjana Parashar celebrates the grandness of animals and laments their disappearance through 63 poems. The book begins with a dedication to the small and tawny wonders of the natural world. These include the mulch, aphids, lac bugs on a Kusum tree, fleas, gold of scarabs, and bees, among others. Through her verse, she looks out for their sound and their silence, and invites an urgent eye towards an intensifying ecological crisis, leading to a changing world around us. “Animals have been an obsession of mine, so it was natural for me to write about them,” the author tells us. “At first, the manuscript was tipping dangerously close to sounding entirely tame in how it celebrated them, and I felt the need for it to have some teeth and bite. That’s when the swerve happened, and I started writing more about their absence,” she adds.
Kunjana Parashar
Parashar has previously won the Toto Funds the Arts award and the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize for her poems. She has been working on her book for five years. Her words are measured; her metaphors are refreshing. She imagines the image of the boar in the dark as a fig. Meanwhile, a fishing cat winnows a pound of fish from the swamp like grains from the chaff. Parashar also takes delight in experimenting with form. Readers can find contrapuntal and concrete poems as well as variations of the haibun and pantoum. Most commonly seen are the prose poems. She recalls reading the American poet Claire Wahmanholm’s collection Wilder, which inspired her to indulge in this form. Additionally, she credits her editor for encouraging her to play around with these. “One of the forms I enjoyed the most due to her suggestion was the burning haibun, invented by poet torrin a. greathouse.”
A series of poems, which look at the extinction of animals, birds, and plants, stand out in the collection. “There was a period of two to three weeks where I wrote them under some kind of a feverish spell,” she reveals. The first poem among these was titled Poem with No Dogs in It. “Once I understood that I wanted to explore this style further, I kept working on similar poems. I also found the title itself to be very generative, so that helped too,” she concludes. Parashar’s collection won the 2024 Barbara Stevens Poetry Book Award, judged by Diane Seuss, who praised the poet’s attentiveness, care, and diction.
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