There is much to enjoy in this engaging and intriguing pamphlet. Personally, I appreciate the metonymic quality whereby associations conjured up by ‘Miniskirts’ on one hand and ‘The Waste Land’ on the other, interact.
To begin with The Waste Land. There are direct references to Eliot’s poem which the narrator reads at school, and which gets her ‘in the gut’. Quotations from the text seem to relate directly to her situation with references to ‘them pills I took/to bring it off’ and ‘hurry up, it’s time’. Tarot cards, like knickers, are checked for ‘propitious signs’.
But there is more than a poetry text here. The mythical wasteland overshadows the narrator throughout her own quest for peace, love and identity, and the unhealing wound of the fisher king is ever present in the many allusions to blood. Poppies, in the title poem, stain ‘like spotting blood’, the narrator is fearful of losing her grip on the ‘Octopus Ride’, losing ‘the blood clot/that might have been you’, grapes eaten in pregnancy are ‘bruised clots’ (‘The Quickening’) in the same way that baby beetroot with bruised leaves swell ‘in the dark/like clotted blood.’ (‘St. Jude of the Lost Cause’). Even CND signs and graffiti painted on street walls is a reminder of the bleeding Jesus hearts of the convent days. (‘My Saviour’).
This is the ever-present backcloth to the ‘Miniskirts’ poems which take the reader in the rapid pace of short lines from Notting Hill to India. Settings are vividly depicted not least in the flow of place names: Portobello, Maida Vale, Holland Park, Goa and Mahatma Gandhi Road. Sensory details are bright and evocative – there are songs and shouts, bric-a-brac and cheap perfumes. A wealth of details that bring time and place to life.
Yet, in images of both countries, there is squalor and decay and an overarching sense of menace and violence. Sunlight splinters a window, in the market there is a ‘carnage’ of ‘jaundiced’ cabbages and a ‘tulip, crushed’. (‘Reflections’). This is bed-sit land where ‘flies from black bags’ spill out into the mould of gutters.
And always there is loneliness and a search for identity which, like questions asked in the wasteland or an artichoke being stripped, reveal ‘mucky secrets’ with ‘each peeled off self/more naked than the last’. (‘Artichokes’).
All the poems in Pratibha Castle’s beautifully constructed book could be seen as questions needed to heal a wounded self, a wounded land. Are they the right questions? Are there answers? There is tenderness in ‘Raat Ki Rani (Queen of the Night) where love is ‘weighty as peace’ and these lines from the first verse do suggest a resolution, a sense of healing:
‘He beckons her to the bed
where his body curls,
a question mark,
on the scarlet quilt,
an invitation she accepts,
entering the current
of his caring as if into
Arabian Ocean spray’
Mandy Pannett 2nd January 2024
