Book Title: What Survives Is The Singing
Author: Shanta Acharya
Publisher: Indigo Dreams Publishing Ltd, Devon, 2020
Date of Publication: February 2020
ISBN #: 978-1912876211
Reviewer: Sarah Lawson
What Survives Is The Singing (the title is a reference to Bertolt Brecht’s lines “Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times”) sings us many songs about our own dark times. Just the fact that this book was put together with unknowing prescience before the recent dark times shows that there is a universality here that applies to many times and places.
The opening poem, “Strange Times”, celebrates and mourns various iconic but often anonymous figures like “a man on his way home, shopping bags in hand, / [who] stalls a column of tanks” or “angels who flew for their lives from blazing towers”. In spite of horrible things in the evening news, humanity soldiers on: “the quality of darkness is how it lets us see.”
One of the most striking poems here, and the one that has attracted the most attention, is “Can You Hear Our Screams?” This arresting poem begins “A chirping bird who ran like a deer / was how her mother described the eight-year-old / whose broken body was found in the bushes.” Acharya goes on to describe the “unmarked graves in gardens, forests and fields” of girls abused and murdered and others who are “discarded at birth with the afterbirth” and “disposed in more ways than you can imagine”, and every line is another shocking jolt. The repeated line “Can you hear their screams?” becomes the final startling “Can you hear our screams?”
You shouldn’t think of Acharya’s poetry as all shocking exposés of abuse, because there is a pleasingly absurd wit in many of them. “The Devil in You” about good and evil, turns into a mass of sly puns and plays on idioms like “the devil’s tattoo” and “devil-may-care”. “The Umbrella” is a flight of fancy about a broken umbrella whose dreams are shattered by being blown inside out; it longs to travel and “of being most true to itself when serving others”.
There are reflections on life and the passage of time, on becoming a mature poet: “Takes a lifetime to be oneself, translate the world / in one’s own language. Creativity does not // come easily, cannot be bought or sold. / It’s a skill to be honed, a gift to be earned.”
After a tour of such varied subject matter, Shanta Acharya is back home—literally, in “Home”, which is “not a country or postcode, / more a state of mind”. It is a temptation to quote the whole thing, because it is one of those poems ostensibly about the poet herself but with reverberating relevance to us all. “Time holds my life up against the light, / a tapestry, tattered though richly embroidered”. Among all the embroidery, what missing stitches, moth holes, and ratty ravelings do all our lives reveal when held up against the light?
~ Sarah Lawson
Sarah Lawson is an American-born Londoner, educated at Indiana University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Glasgow University, where she took a Ph.D. in English in 1971. She is a translator of French, Spanish, Dutch and has published two collections of poetry and four pamphlets. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous British magazines. With a Polish colleague, Małgorzata Koraszewska, she has translated poetry by Jan Twardowski and Anna Kühn-Cichocka. Her translation of Christine de Pisan’s Treasure of the City of Ladies (1405) in Penguin Classics was the first English translation of the work.
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