Quantcast

The Cowherd’s Son by Rajiv Mohabir

Source: Purchased
Paperback, 84 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

The Cowherd’s Son by Rajiv Mohabir, winner of the he Kundiman Poetry Prize, crafts a “Body of Myths” that readers will unravel one poem at a time. From the opening poem, which is the title, to the final prayer in “Unwitting Pilgrim,” readers are taken through a literal and spiritual journey that will expend their energy and emotion, laying it bare on the book’s pages. Through sensual and sometimes unexpected violence in word choice, readers must enter a surreal world of juxtaposition and irony. The narrator of these poems explores the familial and religious expectations of his upbringing with the realities of who he is. In “A Body of Myths,” the narrator says, “In Union Square a kiss betrays…/not to a crest of thorns, but to a hail of fists.” There is a war raging.

A Prayer at Nauraat

Mother
       I hold the clay lamp until
my fingers are tongues of flame
that scribe in soot. I am smoke

that's never stopped curling. See
what smolders in the field,
cane, toil, or the corpse of colony.

Reincarnation or renewal begins in the collection as the narrator on this geographical and spiritual journey begins to understand himself and make peace with the expectations he cannot fulfill. “This mask of clay will smash/against the river stones and I will sail/Snow Moon into the pollution of years//” begins the transformation in “Mantra,” as the narrator reminds us that “I was once as you are. Fixed/to a base or brushed in camel hair” to demonstrate that growth can only be accomplished with conscious change. It is a process that requires attention, a discernment for detail and specific change. To fly from our cages like the “macaw” in “Manhattan” we all must take risks. In “Haunting,” readers are reminded that the past cannot be left behind and discarded because we carry the ghosts of it with us, even as we change. These memories and ghosts are here to remind us that more change is coming and that we need to be prepared to move forward again and again.

The Cowherd’s Son by Rajiv Mohabir is a well crafted collection that will require a great deal of meditation (and in my case, research — as I was unfamiliar with some of the stories referred to in the collection), but even without looking up the unfamiliar, Mohabir’s poems evoke strong emotional reactions from the reader. At once they are beautiful and devastating.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:
Rajiv Mohabir’s The Taxidermist’s Cut was Winner of the AWP Intro Journal Award and the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry from Four Way Books. Recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, he has also received fellowships from the Voices of Our Nation’s Artist foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, City University of New York, and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai’i, where he teaches poetry and composition

Mailbox Monday #579

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has it’s own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Leslie, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what we received:

If It Bleeds by Stephen King from my mom for Mother’s Day.

The novella is a form King has returned to over and over again in the course of his amazing career, and many have been made into iconic films, including “The Body” (Stand By Me) and “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (Shawshank Redemption). Like Four Past Midnight, Different Seasons, and most recently Full Dark, No Stars, If It Bleeds is a uniquely satisfying collection of longer short fiction by an incomparably gifted writer.

Good Bones by Maggie Smith, which I purchased.

Featuring “Good Bones,” which has made a difference to so many people around the globe — called “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio InternationalMaggie Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world.

 

Lantern Puzzle by Ye Chun, which I purchased.

Winner of The Berkshire Prize for First or Second Book, chosen by D. A. PowellEntranced by time and location and the body’s longings, this is a book of self-translation. Each poem has gone through a transmigration process, as the poet negotiates between her native Chinese and her adopted English, attempting to condense, distill, and expand seeing and understanding.

 

The Cowherd’s Son by Rajiv Mohabir, which I purchased.

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Rajiv Mohabir uses his queer and mixed- caste identities as grace notes to charm alienation into silence. Mohabir’s inheritance of myths, folk tales, and multilingual translations make a palimpsest of histories that bleed into one another. A descendant of indentureship survivors, the poet- narrator creates an allegorical chronicle of dislocations and relocations, linking India, Guyana, Trinidad, New York, Orlando, Toronto, and Honolulu, combining the amplitude of mythology with direct witness and sensual reckoning, all the while seeking joy in testimony.

Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker by Phan Nhien Hao, translated by Linh Dinh, which I purchased.

The work of exiled poet Phan Nhien Hao, although he is not permitted to publish in his native Vietnam, is exceptionally well known there. Swaying between poems of the immigrant experience and poems that recollect his homeland’s trauma after the war, his strong, sometimes surreal voice is always intoxicating.

Chaos Theories by Elizabeth Hazen for review from the poet.

The poems in Elizabeth Hazen’s debut collection, Chaos Theories, spring from a unique collusion of science and art in one poet’s heart and mind. In these often elegiac poems, Hazen explores many forms of love — between children, parents, siblings, friends, and lovers. In powerful poetic language and structure, loss is explored, and survival becomes another form of understanding, a way of seeing ourselves and others not as guilty or innocent, good or bad, but as complex, sometimes thwarted beings who are always striving for more wisdom, more empathy, more light. Hazen’s language is elegant, her point of view unflinching, her voice mature and warm.

What did you receive?