On Sumita Chakraborty’s “Arrow”
Arrow, by Sumita Chakraborty
Alice James Books, 2020
$16.95
Describing her debut collection from Alice James Books, Sumita Chakraborty writes, “This book is my arrow, and in it are stories of some of the promises — beautiful, ugly, pained, weary, triumphant, sated and more — that I have made to and asked of the world.” She takes her epigraph from Frank Bidart: “WORLD // with this arrow // I thee wed.” Without punctuation from the famously punctilious Bidart, “this arrow” might belong to the world, or be offered by “I” — rage and hurt fly both ways. A weapon common to every culture with trees hardy enough to shape a bow, Chakraborty’s lyric arrows prick a reader’s heart with their trajectories of love and death, suture and wound.
Arrow is one of those books into which a writer pours everything she knows. From the black hole at its center — Chakraborty’s poems respond to her sister’s death, and to violent family abuse — Arrow spins a galaxy of association. She draws from the languages of myth, astrophysics, and philosophy, while her formal structures include the medieval dream vision, or visio, the Enlightenment prose essay, and 21st century erasure. She adjusts time and space to focus her exploratory lens: it’s broad enough to encompass Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and narrow enough for the dead, blackened eye of a doe.
Rather than approach a subject head-on, Chakraborty’s poems move in concentric layers of imagery and logic. Narratives are presented, restated, reimaged, and redressed. In “Dear, Beloved” the poet enfolds the loss of her sister in a series of parables. Her first establishes the speaker among mountains, where,
An aged sunbeam
would fall on me, then on a nearby summit, until a mass
of ice would appear like a crown of master diamonds
in shades of gold and pink.
Revising this shimmer is melting snow, “making the mountain uglier.” Language shifts from lyrical to medical and back: “My iliacus, from which orchids bloom,” “My femoral nerve, from which lichen grows.” Both body parts involve the genitals; the poet tells her sister,
I want you to hear what I say to lovers, because I want to sing
to you, who died a virgin, a few treatises on love and sex.
“Dear, Beloved” — the words are both a translation of her sister’s name and what lovers call each other — twists together the visceral qualities of sex and death until they are inseparable.
For Chakraborty, spirit and body also remain entangled. In one of a series of short poems named “O Spirit,” she writes, “We take no form until licked into shape by the tongues of those who love us.” Another probes sources of physical and sexual abuse: “It takes work for a woman to welcome a fist/ With her body,” the poem begins; later, “What does it mean that the first time you saw a cock/ It was raised in menace from a boil of shared blood,” a question that begs, “Tell me the origin story of pain, And tell me what happens to pain as it ages.” Like her beloved dead, spirit is buried in the dirt it grew from.
In three of four poems entitled “Essay…” Chakraborty reflects on loss through art. Art — like the philosophical essay — attempts to impose a “myth of order” on what the poet sees as the “borderless nature of death.” In a similar way, formal structures like the essay, fable, and Q&A generate enough distance for a writer to contain and speak what is otherwise unsayable. The “joy” in “Essay on Joy” depends on a cruel syllogism:
Spinoza writes, He who imagines that what he hates is destroyed will rejoice. Some years ago, dozens of grackles fell dead from the sky in Boston, the cause unknown. And so I think: I detest grackles. I rejoice.
The formality of structure, along with Chakraborty’s diction, contrasts with the violence of what she’s describing, creating tension that makes each line taut as a bowstring.
Arrow ends with hope for a future compromised by pain and loss. In the second of two final poems titled “Arrow,” the poet admits, “…even when bereft it’s none other than love around which all of my thoughts cluster.” The final poem “O” takes stock of the journey the book has performed:
There is a space in my body that did
not exist when I
began this book. It
is a window. When I next speak, I
will do so through that window.
Please leave the window unlatched.
As she emerges from the maelstrom, Chakraborty assures readers that she’s discovered her own way to challenge and reenter the world.
Joyce Peseroff's fifth book of poems, Know Thyself, was designated a "must read" by the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award. Recent poems and reviews appear or are forthcoming in On the Seawall, Plume, Plume Anthology, and The Massachusetts Review. She directed UMass Boston's MFA Program in its first four years, and currently blogs on writing and literature at joycepeseroff.com