Poetry
Bones
Mahadai Das · 1988
Synopsis
The author's third collection, written in the United States, where she was then living. The poems speak of the experience of an Indo-Caribbean woman far from Guyana and of a woman's identity in the process of transformation, and return to exile, isolation, love, desire and departure. The Indian heritage surfaces only in a few pieces, the collection turning towards the depths of the inner life.
Context
Published in Leeds by Peepal Tree in 1988, the collection closes a course in three books: the nationalism of the first, which runs from indenture to independence, the disillusion of the second, then the inner life. The author published no other; Denise deCaires Narain gathered in 2010, with the same publisher, a selection of her poems, A Leaf in His Ear, and Jacket2 ranks her, with Rajkumari Singh, among the very first Indo-Guyanese women poets to combine the question of origin with that of gender.
Who it is for
For discovering a major voice of the poetry of Guyana's Indians in her most personal collection, in English.
Prizes and reception
Far Journey Caribbean praises its delicate sensibility, while noting a few conventional images.
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