A Reluctant Survivor

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The poetry of A Reluctant Survivor is concerned with the self and the ways in which it negotiates the world and withdraws from it by turns. In this book, places and people can appear at once familiar and fantastic, vulnerable and strange. Most of Sridala Swami's poems are short and spare but her words are deceptively simple and her silences resonate with suggestions and ambivalences. More evocative than descriptive, these poems have an inwardness bordering on meditation, but there is also an engagement with the world outside - cities, temples, riot-ravaged streets. Above all, these poems reflect on the subtleties of human relationships.

A Reluctant Survivor was short-listed for The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in 2008.

Sridala Swami's poetry has appeared in various journals including Chandrabhaga, The Little Magazine, New Quest, Wasafiri, Asian Cha and the Creative Writing Issue of The South Asian Review (28:3, 2007). Her work features in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil, UK: Bloodaxe, 2008.)

She lives in Hyderabad and writes poetry and fiction.

Until I wrote and discarded several drafts of this Introduction, I did not realise how hard it would be to say something about my own work. Ideally. I'd like to leave the reader to read my poetry and make what s/he can of it. After all, everything I want to say ought to be found in my poems. However, an introduction to my work might not be out of place here, since this is my first book.

I've been asked now and again why I write poetry, and I find it a very difficult question to answer. In his Letters To A Young Poet, Rilke says. "Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word had entered, and more unsayable that all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory lives."

Sridala Swami is surprisingly mature as a poet, not only in her outlook or the way she approaches a poem, but the surefooted way she can select and handle the most difficult of themes. To pick at random, take her poem. "All Music is Memory":

All music is memory:

a lone wind trapped in the chimes,

a window rattling dolefully

in time to the movement of the night.

If my life were stretched

across the drum of centuries

I might have time to discern

the pattern in the creaking of trees.

But destinies drown through time.

A million years are lost

and I try in vain to cup my hands

and hold a note, a scale, a song.

Sridala Swami is seeking the impossible-a pattern in the creaking of trees. Without telling us explicitly, she is talking about not just music or memory getting 'trapped in the chimes', (what a fine image) but existence itself. The transience of things comes through without a word being mentioned and the last stanza acts a diminuendo - after all the poem is about music. And the poem is replete with images, the wind in the chimes. rattling window, the drum of centuries, creaking trees.

**Contents and Sample Pages**