Scribblings of My Soul
Poetry has a long tradition of what is called “constrained writing.” After all, many poetic forms depend on very specific meter, rhyme schemes, number of lines, and even points of repetition. In the case of Preethi Saravanakumar’s latest volume of poetry, Scribblings of My Soul, however, that constraint starts with the number nine.
“Nine represents completion, but not the end,” Saravanakumar explains in the book’s foreword. “It represents the end of one cycle as well as the transition. It’s such a positive hopeful number that’s full of wisdom and compassion. The number nine is powerful, mystical and empowering all at once!”
The book’s subtitle reflects the concept: 9 Words, 9 Sections, 9 Emotions, 9 Poems and 9 Artworks. You may be wondering what those nine words are; Saravanakumar introduces them in a thesis statement of sorts: “SMILE with all your HEART gathering STRENGTH from LIFE, shedding any lingering PAIN to learn the TRUTH of LOVE and HOPE, walking towards the LIGHT.” These are not discrete subjects, then, but a journey along a winding yet connected path toward transcendence.
INSIGHT UNCOVERED THROUGH FORM AND STRUCTURE
Each of the nine words acts as an organizing principle for the poems, heading up a section. There are nine poems in each section, each exploring different emotional and intellectual dimensions of the theme. Each section of the book is also accompanied by a thematic, dreamy ink wash illustration by Brazilian artist Juliana Duclos. As with the framework for the book, many of the poems hold to a form, incorporating not only standard poetic conventions such as rhyme, but also unique structures that become tools for the exploration of themes and concepts.
For example, in “Live and Let Live,” Saravanakumar reflects on the way art transforms into life through the power of the imagination: “People write stories, / Stories capture words, / Words show scenes, / Scenes create moments, / Moments mirror images, / Images paint memories, / Memories make life.” This type of repeating structure is used in other poems in the collection, such as “Arrogance to Compassion,” which describes how different emotions “mirror” each other and yet still hold the potential to evolve from negativity into positivity.
Such poems are deceptively simple on the surface, inviting readers down a path of logic that leads to profound insight. Another example can be found in the poem “This Is My Nature,” which begins “Daughter or sister, wife or mother, / whatever you may call me, I will nurture.” The repetition of the argument “this” or “that” continues throughout the poem, demonstrating that for every span of possibilities, there is one unwavering truth.
The poems in Scribblings of My Soul range in subject matter from philosophical musings on the nature of life, love, self and soul; to affirmations of autonomy and self-love; to rapturous depictions of nature and expressions of human connection. There is the drifting world of memory and emotion, as well as a more clinical one of intellectual analysis. But there are also reminders of the importance of being present — in the world, in our bodies, in our experiences and with each other — as in these lines from “Dance With Me”: “All there is, is now. Just, now. / This moment. This truth. / This me. / This you!”
POEMS IMBUED WITH IMAGERY AND PHILOSOPHY
Throughout the book, Saravanakumar loops back in various ways to a stable of imagery that includes the universal — stars, rainbows, clouds, sunsets and seasons — but also the unusual, as in the poem “Bubbles in Water”: “People have views that are like bubbles in water, / they float, move, change and pop … / Do they have a base to sit on or are they secured / in a spot? Are they non-existent, but aptly cured / to live their truths for a period and then be gone?” It is a metaphor she returns to several times, each time applying it in intriguing ways to a different context or concept.
Among the highlights of the collection is the marvelous “Rocked,” in which failure and success, despair and joy, are seen as a necessary flux in life to be celebrated, not feared: “It’s often a wave that mysteriously / brings you back where you started! / All over again to begin, beguilingly / you stand in the same smitten spot, inhaling the essence of petrichor.”
There’s also “Magic of Self-Love,” with its artistic metaphors that propel the reader forward with expansive joy; “The Diamonds in the Sky” with its musings on innocence, existential anxiety and reawakening; and “Lost in the Wild,” with its lush landscape imagery and flow of present-participle verbs, an expression of the “infinite now” of nature.
Taken as a whole, Scribblings of My Soul covers a lot of ground, not only in themes but in form. There is much reward here for readers who enjoy poetry with a philosophical or intellectual bent. It is a collection of works in which concept is king and joy and light win out over despair and darkness in the end.
