In her new collection of poems, The Soundtrack of My Life – Side B, Srividya Sivakumar is fearless in her expression of desire and the sexual experience. This is Sivakumar’s third collection of poems, after The Blue Note, and The Heart is an Attic. With this work she pushes against traditional norms that define women in roles of chastity, duty or devotion, invoking a feminism that is essentially personal, allowing for a mix of many elements: desire and fulfilment; intimacy and tenderness; nostalgia and loss; betrayal and assertion; desire and dream; love’s reversal and grief.

Sivakumar’s articulation is both personal and shared, and because she shares it consciously through poetry, the reader absorbs the sharing slowly and unhurriedly, allowing it to leach below the discomfort of convention, so the verses reveal themselves in essence as a quest for intimacy, love and fulfilment. One of the most tender of exchanges is in the poem, “You are a pigment of my imagination” wherein she first hints at her own cruel response to her mother’s overtures while growing up, then shares this with her:

Some of what I write and say worries you.
I know, ma.
But haven’t you taught me that choices are mine to make?

Poems like “Siesta” express a frank and flowing fervour for fulfilment:

This need a river. This desire a fever…
My moans his cries. His silence my sighs.
This bed is our ocean. This love a magic potion.

This is personal and intimate, unlike Kamala Das’s more generalised amorphous lover in An Introduction: “…he is every man / Who wants a woman, just as I am every / Woman who seeks love. In him…the hungry haste/ Of rivers, in me….the ocean’s tireless / Waiting.”

In Sivakumar’s poem, “Arm of Fire”, fulfilment is a fire that is not concerned with disregarding social norms, for it blazes with “Domestic bliss and boudoir decadence / Both create words that carry the fragrance / of this man.” Metaphors of love and lovers appear unexpectedly, often at the end of poems. “Fifteenth” describes the tender childhood joys of a traditional life in the poet’s home state of Tamil Nadu, with all its sounds and tastes, to end abruptly in physical attraction: “My veins tightly pressed against his / We mingle, red-blooded”. In “Cornflower Caresses”, the kurunji flower is a perfect lover: “It appears so rarely, almost reluctantly, / in a burst of Crayola blue.”

In “City of Joy”, sexual fulfilment can be an act of worship for a man, and she a goddess who responds to his devotion. But disillusionment comes. For what is offered has “slim pickings”, his visits are too few. And the body with its stretch marks hasn’t frolicked enough, hasn’t crossed enough boundaries. In “Pith”, magnetism fluctuates, juices run dry. This is not a perennial river nor an underground spring, with the acrid final line providing a summation: “Too many oranges and everything tastes like pips.”

The metaphor of pain

A dominant emotion in Sivakumar poetry is pain, expressed subtly and through moving metaphors. It comes when a lover leaves. In “Talking Tubers with Lovers”, it is: “…This ending, a blunt knife through frozen butter…The shards melt in the heat of what has been uttered / and disappear, like love.” In the title poem, metaphors for a lost love build up slowly: a forlorn tree, a simmering pool, a funnel of breeze. Then the growing realisation: “Some days, the distance is a crack in the wall. / Other times, a chasm. / A poem. A song. A cry. A thorn.” Most painful is betrayal. The poem “Levee” is one of the most poignant ones in the book, giving us a fearless expression of sexual love, intimacy and closeness, only to convey betrayal:

But a heart remembers, a shaking off of a hand,
a walking away towards the temple door,
a stubborn set of the mouth.
How can it be soft, merciful intimacy
when it is coupled with the stiff upper lip?

Tell me – do you cry in front of her?

But loss, distancing, and betrayal are not without their resistances. Sivakumar’s sophistication of assertion comes from her command over words, over complexity, over compromise, over search. In “Stand By”, she begins by saying: “as I / erase each memory, week by week”. Some lines are not a threat, but a decision:

Slowly but surely you will no longer exist.
You will be a raft in a raging river.
And I will be long gone.
Watch me.

It is a feminist assertion that she reflects in her poem to her daughter, a poem with the Tamil title, “Rowthiram Pazhagu”, a celebrated phrase from the iconic Tamil poet Subramania Bharati, who urges the reader to practise their anger, to nurture it. Sivakumar writes: “Don’t just be okay with being angry. Practice your anger … What you do need / is to be your authentic self”. In “Telekinesis in Tamil Nadu”, she addresses all women when she writes: “Don’t shine less because you are too much / for some…You are. / And that is enough.”

And yet the heart never stops dreaming: of love, of closeness, of intimacy, of belonging. In poems such as “Inexplicable Grace and Mise En Place”, there is the lushness of images followed by the grace of belonging, only to end startlingly with the fact that belonging is only words written in a poem or a desire that feels so alive and real. In “Travel Plans in Limbo”, there is longing expressed both in the simplicity of an embrace at a train station and the luxurious image of “my legs intertwined with sea anemone”. But in the endlines, the reader sees that it is only “a poem about a place I’ve only visited in my dreams.”

The poems have little patience with silences that are unnecessary but simply present, or are reminiscent of that aspect of childhood that is dark and brooding, or of a letter never sent. Similarly, there is little hope from well-known deities who would rather pass the buck than intervene to aid a girl in distress. Death, too, appears joyless but there is hope in the afterlife.

So certain questions arise: If death enters joylessly in life, can we assume (as the poet does) that it will be joyful in the afterlife? Will the body (not withstanding stretchmarks), if frolicked enough to cross boundaries, lead to fulfilment, or is this a quest for something else? Besides being dark and brooding or sticky “like toffee to your teeth” (“Stillness”), can silences also provide rest and restoration?

The Soundtrack of my Life – Side B is a stylish collection, in assertion and in the use of language, both English and occasionally Tamil. It is also tender in its need and desire for fulfilment that abides, tender in giving glimpses of a rooted childhood and family ties with parents and a sister that endure. Most of all, it is a deep engagement with poetry as a means of communication, both with herself and with others, for as she writes in her author bio: “words, well-used, can carry worlds.”

Neera Kashyap has worked in newspaper and developmental journalism, specialising in social and health communications. Her books include Daring to Dream, Cracks in the Wall, and The Art of Unboxing.

The Soundtrack of My Life – Side B, Srividya Sivakumar, Red River Press.

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