I discovered this little gem through an inexplicably serendipitous, `spur of the moment’ action of someone “on a morning that was so gloriously ordinary”. An action that completely altered the course of my life with the elegance and permanence of an artist’s chisel on an unyielding rock; and made me realize “how life & its events flow over me with the ungraspable viscosity of water”, leaving behind a “swift scent of questions” unanswered.

I had to get this book shipped from half way across the planet because it is not available where I live. It was totally worth the trouble. I thought I knew what heart-break felt like, for I had been writing about it for years, even to the applause of those deeply hurt. I couldn’t have been more wrong; when it hit me, it was nothing like anything that I have ever felt. I was curled up in bed without any appetite either for food or sleep. As one of the poems says, “sleep doesn’t come to the waking – but the waking come upon sleep”; but I, with this wrenching pain in my heart, could never go to sleep. Pooja captures such helplessness so beautifully when she says “unwanted as the hunger of a stranger one cannot feed”. When I was going through such pain, living as a zombie in insomnia, that the book finally arrived in my hands. Rin Gristwood did an amazing job of creating such a hauntingly beautiful cover. There couldn’t have been a better illustration to present the deep, insightful, complex thoughts Pooja has captured in her poetry. However, one look at the cover is all it took for me to break down completely, as it brought back the very feelings that I had been fighting hard to suppress. Once I gathered enough courage and opened the book, it was solace itself speaking to me through every line, reaching to my tender heart with her nimble fingers and mending every broken part.

“the poem always makes the first move” says she while “I’m seducing a poem, working through a whole day for her”. Can you ever seduce a poem? No, not even if you work through not one but all your infinitely recurring lives for her. It’s the poem that seduces you and leaves you suffering with “the flitting memory” of its enchanting beauty for the rest of eternity.

O Adam, the cursed one, how fortunate you are! You were banished from Eden with your Eve, so you could make a “clean song” of her “as of a flute carved of bone”. You could “not hear each other, for neither remembers that you were part of a whole”, but you had each other to touch and write and find God in your thoughts, smells, tastes and the skies above you. My Eve left me feeling incomplete forever, after she showed me we were part of a whole, and promised we would speak of God, and everything that might or might not have been of his creation. I would gladly burn my soul in hell till the end of eternity, just to speak a few words with her. But alas! we can’t hear each other, for our voices were swallowed by two black-holes separated by a deep chasm in space where an endless number of “parallel universes float past, oblivious as fish”.

On reading the poem `confession’, I was crying, “It’s not like I don’t know. … if only you’d waited, you’d know”. `withdrawal’, the poem, speaks to me “wait you – as if I would come for you”. waiting – that’s exactly what I had been doing as if she would come for me. But the poem speaks again – “I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.”. I know, she wouldn’t! “do you who possess the patient agony of a god’s ear, resent your never ending wait?” asks another.

Those poems were my constant companions as I was mustering every last ounce of my willpower to cope with the excruciating pain of lost love, and get out of this place that “is south even of south, south of hell & south of darkness”. My perennially flowing tears – smudges on those white pages, and black letters – came alive as soft creatures of a strange universe consoling and comforting, singing the aubade of my soul as “the shapeless threat of your departure” loomed over.

In an agonizing moment when I couldn’t bear it any more and wanted to beg for mercy, throwing away all my scruples, and swallowing my pride like an eclipsed Sun, another poem kept me company “there is no justice. only mercy. your mercy is my hell; my hell is your mercy; your hell, mine; mine; yours. we push & pull, children at a park.”

PS: all the quoted phrases in the text above were from the poems in the book.

Still, we are very proud that Quynh Dao’s book was shortlisted for this prize. To find out more about Tales of a Mountain City, click here

**waves**

Cherry Mischievous