By Emily Shearer, Poetry Editor, Minerva Rising Press
“It was a changeling season,” writes Rita Banerjee in “Atlantis,” just one of the many wholly immersive and well-knit poems that form her newest collection, Echo in Four Beats, released last month from Finishing Line Press. “Atlantis” begins with a portrayal of a seaside scene at winter’s end, but the paean to the salt air and seagulls lapses into an elegy for love past: “We were . . . laughter against a white-noise wind, tongues / circling salt-water stories.” Throughout this entrancing book, Banerjee wields her adept knowledge of languages, marrying meaning to subjects as varied as myth, the Bible, rules of grammar, imperialism, The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath. She is worldly and wise, wending her worded way through Chicago, through Japanese senryu, through Roma folksong and Ovidian hymns. The poet’s multilingualism and the way she toggles between languages—among them French, Japanese, Romanian—both in her original writing and her translation are innovative and exhaustive. Nestled among the pastiches and translations and “mis-translations,” readers will find ekphrastic odes to Renoir and Baudelaire, erasures constructed as carefully as sculptures from which all but the essential clay has been scraped, and pastiches to masters both well- and lesser-known.
“Small Berries”
I bought a box
of strawberries today.
They were ripe & they
were tart.
I would like to share them
with you.
But not
the satisfaction—.
This pastiche to William Carlos Williams pays homage in the best way; not only is it the highest form of flattery the poet can pay to a mentor who surely lit her literary pathways, it also ends on the same bittersweet note as a dish of plums from the icebox. There is more to the story, and this poet leaves us as hungry as if she had eaten all our strawberries and left us with nothing but a craving and a desire.
In “Creation Hymn I,” after Ovid, mythical Echo lays eyes on Narcissus:
“Echo saw him
she, who cannot be
silent, might learn how
to speak first herself”
And of Georgia Brown, sweet Georgia Brown of blues hall fame, Banerjee intones,
“she was an echo in four beats.”
Creation hymns populate the first part of the book, later giving way to destruction hymns and hymns to Thanatos, Greek personification of death. And in each, one might say of the poet herself:
“her voice, her bones,
shapes of stone heard
by everyone: sound lives in her.”
If you have been waiting for sounds to fall from Echo’s lips and stir you to wakefulness, do not wait until after tomorrow. Banerjee is here with a rallying cry to carpe the f*ck out of this diem. “There were no tomorrows left anymore,” she warns in “Après-demain,” and “. . . there isn’t a story i haven’t believed in,” from “Paper Men.”
Jaswinder Bolina, author of The 44th of July, Phantom Camera, and CarrierWave, has called this book “the first truly post-national book of poems [she’s] ever read.”
Banerjee’s scope is wide, and her reach does not exceed her grasp. While she looks for home, characterized as nothing more than a “constant state of momentary arrivals*,” she dwells in ocean, in moonlight, in making love to Thanatos as a lover worships the body next to her in bed. She explores the realms of water, whether shipwrecked Atlantis or sound inside a leaf-grown well. She revels in the oop! and wop of a didgeridoo and regales in the language of Hindu gods, Japanese frogs, and those the world over whose tongues circle the stories of these poems, “ready for what / it will allow: / to wait for sounds.”
***
Minerva Rising would like to thank Rita Banerjee for serving selflessly and inspirationally as the judge for our 2017 “Dare to Speak” Poetry Chapbook Contest. Ms. Banerjee selected Rebecca Connors’ manuscript “Split Map” as the winner of $200 and ten author copies of her book, which will be released by the press in August 2018.
*Tara Skurtu, author of The Amoeba Game and Skurtu, Romania