Customer Reviews

Black Candle: Poems about Women from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

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I found these poems to reveal a harsh beauty. If I joke that American women should read this before they complain it would be to ease the tension over severity with which women are treated in many of these Asian cultures. Divakaruni has revealed a piece of her soul and raised concerns over the mistreatment of women in Asia (as well as anywhere in the world for that matter) These poems are best read a couple at a time so one can absorb the passion and the reality of the situations described. A few of the poems in this collection moved me close to tears. Hopefully, a better day will dawn. I would like to apend my earlier comment that American women should read this by stating that all the men need to read it, too.

Black Candle is a supremely impressive collection of poetry rich with metaphor and set on the Indian sub-continent. These poems portray moving, palpable portraits of women's lives that will strike a universal chord of recognition and appreciation with the western reader. The Room: I have walked this corridor so many times/I no longer notice/the gouged floorboards, the brown light/washing the peeling walls, the stale/childhood smell of curried cabbage.//I am looking for the door,/the one whose striated knob/matches perfectly the lines of my palm,/which opens without sound/into a room with milk-blue walls.//On the sill, a brass bowl/of gardenias in water. Peacocks/spread silk feathers against cushions./The white cockatoo on its stand/knows my name. Sun filters/through the sari of a woman/who rises toward me. I am caught/by the lines of her bones, the fine/lighted hairs on her held-out arm,/your eyes, mother, in her mouthless face.

Black Candle succeeds in its prose poems that a vignettes of the difficulties of life as a South Asian. The poems also work if one judges them as vignettes rather than poetry. Yoga Lessons is the strongest piece as poetry. Even as vignettes, however, the ubiquous use of first person, which works well for the poems in isolation, fails to work in the collection as the reader gets many "I's" of which some are the same and others not. The book does as excellent job of making the foreign culture and environment accessible to Americans.

This book reminds me most of Jana Harris' work where pioneer women's stories are made into poetry. If you enjoyed that, you'll surely enjoy this,

Divakaruni's poetry is visceral, breath taking, and haunting. Her images will stay with you. Her other collection of poetry is also impressive. Leaving Yuba City: Poems. I recommend reading anything she has written. Her prose is beautiful: Sister of My Heart: A Novel, Queen of Dreams, The Mistress of Spices: A Novel, The Vine of Desire: A Novel, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives: Stories, Arranged Marriage: Stories... All are excellent.

I was surprised by this book. I generally dislike "modern" poetry, but these poems were different. They seemed to speak of things in a way that sounded very genuine. The major fault of the book was that all of the poems seemed to emphasise how hard and terrible women's lives were, usually as the result of actions by men. This is fair enough, but when ALL of the poems seemed to have this same theme, it began to sound more like a collection of ehining rather than genuine emotional expression. A few verses on something other than mosery would have been nice. But all in all a very nice book. Well worth the price.