The Undying Muse: Nivedita Dey’s LARKSPUR LANE
Whimsical and wise, reflective and poignant, Nivedita Dey poems are a contrast to the gloomy poetry of our age, even while delving into the darkest recesses. She passionately declares space for poetry’s possibilities and promises.
A recent opinion piece in The New York Times argued that poetry ‘died’ with T.S. Eliot’s ‘patient etherized’ image. The essayist, Matthew Walther wrote: “The culprit is not bad pedagogy or formal experimentation but rather the very conditions of modern life, which have demystified and alienated us from the natural world.” He continues, “…modern life, disenchanted by science and mediated by technology, has made that kind of relationship with the natural world impossible.”
But there are still contemporary poets whose work defy any declarations of poetry being a dead art. Nivedita Dey’s Larkspur Lane: Branched Labyrinths of the Mind (Notion Press, 2021) provides a contrast to the gloomy poetry of our age, even while delving into the dark recesses. Her poetry is whimsical and wise in tone, thematically reflective and poignant; she can captivate without annihilating the wonder of her words.
Dey’s poems remind us that in such an age where this poetical skepticism is given mainstream voice there still lives an eternal wisdom accessible to poets. We can continue to write about the wisdom of nature, the love of beauty, the depth of emotion present in each moment. We can still reflect on the eternity of mind.
Dey’s playfulness is not without seriousness; poems such as “Life—a mere palindrome” suggests that the reader contemplate the nature of the poem itself. In its terseness, the poem questions the poet’s own birth poetically. Dey writes, “Life lifted my eyes / Placed me between parallel mirrors”. These lines serve as a reflection upon the poem, which reads the same from beginning to end, or in reverse.
The next poem incorporates parallel tensions again: “Spring has her own winter too, I guess!” (“Polyphony”). Although the poem is a reflection on the nature of time, it also declares polyphony’s ambiguity.
I feel most endeared toward “Maps of Mishaps” because it recognizes how the small things in life grow into the larger ones. The language is gentle and graceful, and word choices parallel the theme. For instance, the opening line is “The acorn pines for immortality,” which allows the paralleling language to encompass meaning in richly devised ways. “Pines” is both an emotional state and the very trees the poem describes.
The nature of Dey’s language reflects poetry back to its unique strengths. The acorn pines to be a pine, “a forever greener grander pine tree.” The cyclical nature of the poem imitates the timeless rebirth of its subject.
In “Transcendence”, the poet writes “Spread out / Like the tree / Send down your roots,” while poetical objects peer back at their connected pathways: the spoon stares at the tongue, food stares at the poet, and “I stare back at me / In love, remind my mind / How long?” The mystery of this transcendence is what is being transcended. Each moment succeeds the next, offering a unity of time to the observer.
In this poem, transcendence is the present moment eternal. The poem elaborates on the nature of human impatience. As human beings, we ask ourselves in each moment (perhaps subconsciously), “How long?” The poet suggests sending “down your roots” to ground yourself in the present.
Its immediate meaning is a maze, but metaphorically it could stand for an emotional knot we intend to unravel, a mental puzzle, or life’s journey itself. Dey’s collection encapsulates all these meanings, including searching for lost love as a means to return to oneself.
Throughout these “branched labyrinths” we find that the poet is “Looking for the lost / Memory of the One / I am”, as she searches in “Homecoming”; “a lonely look back upon the familiar bylanes / Of what was once my home” as she says in “Love Poem to Salvador Dali”; and, “I search for fingerprints on my natal wall / To trace back my path right up to you,” as written in “The Visitor.”
“Labyrinth” is a confused and luxurious word, rich in metaphorical implications. Its immediate meaning is a maze, but metaphorically it could stand for an emotional knot we intend to unravel, a mental puzzle, or life’s journey itself. Dey’s collection encapsulates all these meanings, including searching for lost love as a means to return to oneself.
In “Jealousy Unmade” she writes:
Even while making
Unmaking
Ravenous love
I never eat your navel
These words are placed almost with the intention to instill a sense of sacredness back to lovemaking. In the Torah, god is jealous to protect his people, but protectiveness of space also implies richness of meaning in such space.
Dey writes further,
the sheer shearing of
My lamb – or woolen clothes for
My winter – mere selfish act, not
Love making…
The poet so lucidly describes the act of disrobing in “Jealous Unmad”, that the reader is led to numerous reflections. The lamb is clearly the poet who’s “shearing” alone does not make the act of lovemaking; rather, being “a muse to my Muse” makes love central to one’s being.
Finally, there are the last lines of the poem: “My love is a Mexican / Wedding night gown with a hole / At your sacred belly button role.” The guardedness of the poet is what makes love tender. The navel is a kind of taboo space the poet will not allow herself to engage; instead, she carves a space for it to delineate its sacredness. By nature, this also describes inspiration itself as a guarded act. If this does not remind readers that the muses are still inspiring poets, I do not know what could.
Dey’s poems exceed the personal in captivating ways—but they are also capable of capturing the personal, too. For instance, in “Couple Goals” she writes “I killed the still young evening for you / With wordy bullet sprays, / Then cried foul and called you the murderer.” This poem evokes a guilt, but the reader is not clear on the situation being rendered poetically. It can be assumed that some words were exchanged, and the poet realized only later that she was to blame for the argument. However, the lines are tender and gentle in their revelations: “Now my face is rain-splashed / With / Remorse—regret – repentance.” The title of the poem invokes a sense that the poet recognizes even these heated discussions are essential to romantic rendezvous. She writes finally, “I want to undo all those words / And instead, just do you. / Do you, too?”
The circular language logic of “Couple Goals” also finds itself in the last lines of poems such as “Violence of Love”: “I no longer rein me in. / Tonight. Reign in me.” The nature of conceptualized violence is cyclical; it is like a storm cyclone, constantly reverberating back to itself, brooding. In this poem, the descriptiveness of the violence contrasts with the previous poems’ moods. Dey writes, “Rain razor sharp splinters / Let pink blue splices fly off / Shredded.” Now, Dey seeks a tameness from the violence.
“Eternity” reverts to Dali again. “Pour some time in his Dalian watch”, she writes, suggesting that this poem may be a reflection on memory, which the poet calls “an empty sketch of eternity.”
If it only a bubble be, still blow up one
Of grainy glass. Sand, shovels,
Hands, knees, colliding,
Cutleries, pillows, billowing
Steam and rouge.
…Mystic fruits bloom better. For Narcissus.
“Eternity” is ripe with ambiguity, and rightfully so. The subject seems to be the persistence of memory, but embedded is a curse against life for the situation it forces on women. The poem takes surrealism to the edge and brings it back, suggesting that human choice allows the social arrangements we make for ourselves. These things are not divinely ordained “mystic fruits.”
Taste is an abstract entity in many of these poems. Dey revels in abstraction and whimsical wordplay. Her phrases mellow back on themselves; each line is enjambed with capital letters. It is these stylistics that give steadiness and structure to the poetry itself. In “Love In a Broken World,” love becomes something attainable instead of abstract. It is breaking bread between opposing forces. She writes,
I will break up the bread
Crumbs you cast away
Denied eating from my
Lap of love I will now
Break among teeming
Jews Pharisees alike
The candidness of the poem startles as it veers into its final lines, “Drinking your seed out of / My hand you once held.” In these lines, the poet expects the love of her “Holy of Holies” to drink the seed from her hand. The poem celebrates the outcast, the forlorn; yet, it is the purest revelry in abstract mirth that the poet harbors her words.
These poems are rebellious, reverberating, genuine, obscure, enlightened, and rich in candor. Larkspur Lane: Branched Labyrinths of the Mind is a large selection of literature coaxed from the mournful yet rich experiences of the poet within herself. The reflections skims across a diversity of themes, including nature, the divine, the muses, and the love of reading.
Several poems in the section titled “The Mind and Its Warzones” refer to derealization, or a sense of dissociation from the environment. Describing the state in “The Blurred”, Dey writes “I feel like / A limbo in my head.” The poem further questions the environment of the poet from many angles. She writes as if she feels like the victim of a simulation. The final line ends ominously, “Oh, you’re so dead.” Now, the basis of personal reality has come into question, too. Dey says, “My head putrid with fears, lies, philosophies. What if / All are false?” Her reality is shaken, and her language conveys this terroristic sense of loss.
Much of this section finds its focus in themes of mental health, and contains illusions to Hamlet in poems like “Nyct-Ophelia” and “Hamlet Mind.” The pun on nyctophilia, or the love of the night and darkness, is appropriate as the poem reflects on mental confusion. Dey writes:
Words like twisted nest – too dumb
For wise ears – for dumb ones
Too wise – scattered scrapes
Of brains and trains of thought
Here, the hubris of Hamlet as a personal reflection is captured as part of Dey’s own thought process.
In “Hamlet Mind,” subtitled “on social anxiety disorder”, the poet again employs literary allusion to describe herself. But, in misappropriating Hamlet’s own choice phrases, does she claim to be kindred of him?
Counting wretched deeds
Is a question of fluctuating priority,
To bare or not to bare
The Soul,
The subject seems to be the persistence of memory, but embedded is a curse against life for the situation it forces on women. The poem takes surrealism to the edge and brings it back, suggesting that human choice allows the social arrangements we make for ourselves.
The writing is both Shakespearean and Dickinsonian. As Dey takes aim at her own misgivings, she also questions how much public confession she can handle.
Several poems in the collection were taken as ironic challenges by social media groups. One such poem is “I have floated on the Iceberg of Death,” in which Dey finds “a dehumanized head”—presumably her own. The poem is graphic and maintains subtle poise between mental life and metaphor. “The phoenix never learnt to swim / Once fire was won over / Ice began its play.” These lines are reminiscent of Spenser’s “My Love is like to ice, and I to Fire.”
The allusions are carried further in the next section “On Memory and Decadence” with poems such as “April is No Cruelest Month of All”. Here, instead of lilacs bleeding from the dead land, we have “juicy sour dreams” where air brings “cool, damp kisses on our cheeks.” This poem reminds readers in an appeal to the collective sense that spring renews and makes young again.
With the wetness suckling our feet
Wisps of moist April breeze
Lightly whipping our faces
With strands of stubborn hair
We meander through the mazes
Of previous night’s plight
To treasure hunt.
Sensuality arises in the next lines. “Fleshy mounds, each with a strange hint of a green nipple” refers to mangoes bulging to life. By recognizing the sensuality of spring, Dey counters Eliot and brings to life the necessity of all that is green. The seasons are paralleled with human psychology. Rather than being the cruelest month, April represents a natural pattern of return.
In the section “On Humanity, the Metamodern, and Things Miscellaneous” Dey defines herself apart from, yet within, literary traditions such as Romanticism. In “Not A Romantic Poet” she asks what room we have for the Romantic following a litany of destructions facing Nature. Using the language of colour to reclaim nature, she writes:
the eyes
Turned red with
Pestilence of fear and fume
Evermore.
In Dey’s poems on humanity, the reader is susceptible to discovering how they’ve become victims of our own greed. In some ways, she seems to agree to an extent with the aforementioned essayist concerning Eliot: that there are no longer any natural sights, and the muses have fled. She writes in “Flashes Upon My Indian Eye” exquisite lines to delineate the human from the natural while suffusing the two together:
This sultry twilight, I look around me
Find no yellow daffodil field
Yet, a silver dot on a coral blue forehead
My vacant and pensive Eye does fill!
In the section titled “On Poetry and Performance” the poet calls poetry “My mistress / My whore” and describes her poetic process and muse. Poetry here is almost a process of giving birth. Later, in “Obstetrics of Blues”, the poet shapes the idea that: “Words, I search for words in vogue / As if they are the perfect forceps / To end the labor—.” By noting the pangs and sorrows of poesy composition, Dey reclaims poetry for the world to see.
Yes, some skeptics may continue to believe that the artform itself is being dishonored, or has deceased. But Larkspur Lane passionately declares space for poetry’s possibilities and promises. Dey may not be Dickinson, Eliot, Yeats, Pound or Spenser, but her verse certainly resounds with such deep natures.
In the final section of Larkspur Lane, Dey offers a glimpse of her next collection:
Pregnant with a premature pause
Never meant, never prepared for
I now groan again
And again
Each night
A new poem is born.
The birth is a defiant promise of poetry’s immortality. And with Dey’s future work, I will continue to look forward to the fresh birthing of the muses.
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Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, Café Dissensus Everyday, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, and several other publications. He hosts the popular interview series ‘World Inkers Network’ on Youtube. You can find him on Instagram: @poetpickering and Twitter: @DustinPickerin2.
