Malabar Mind

by Anita Nair

In Malabar Mind, Anita Nair's debut collection of poems, the real and corporeal, landscapes and mindscapes are explored with a fluid ease. From the quirky resonance of Malabar's names to the stressed drone of television newscasters during war time; from the apathy of non-stick frying pans to the quiet content of cows chewing cud, Anita Nair rakes through the everyday, pausing each time for an unusual moment. Love, failure, humor, irony, lust, hope, anguish; beaches, crows, bus journeys, hospitals, just about every aspect of the human existence finds place in this collection of poems written over a decade.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Anita Nair is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of the novels The Better Man, Ladies Coupé, Mistress, Lessons in Forgetting, Idris: Keeper of the Light and Alphabet Soup for Lovers. She has also authored a crime series featuring Inspector Gowda.

Anita Nair’s other books include a collection of poems titled Malabar Mind, a collection of essays titled Goodnight & God Bless and six books for children. Anita Nair has also written two plays and the screenplay for the movie adaptation of her novel Lessons in Forgetting which was part of the Indian Panorama at IFFI 2012 and won the National Film Award in 2013. Among other awards, she was also given the Central Sahitya Akademi award and the Crossword Prize. Her books have been translated into over thirty one languages around the world. She is also the founder of the creative writing and mentorship program Anita’s Attic.

Reviews

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of 40 poems by Anita Nair begins with verse that is imbued with Indianness and has a timeless feel, and progresses into more modern and – at times -- erotic territory. For those unfamiliar with Indian geography, the Malabar Coast is the southwest coast of India. It stretches from Goa down through Kerala, and as far as the southern tip of India. The author’s last name, Nair, is one used by members of a caste from the state of Kerala. The Malabar Coast is known for spice, tea, and coffee plantations inland, and coastal ports that carry those commodities to buyers around the world that date back long before the British colonized India. Because of the long history of the spice trade, this area has its own unique feel. That should give the reader some sense of the cultural elements suffused into this work.

The poems are generally free verse (though there’s a prose poem and perhaps some other forms,) and are mostly in the range of a couple stanzas to about three pages, though the final poem, “The Cosmopolitan Crow” is a long form poem. The entire collection weighs in at around 100 pages. The author frequently uses a sparse form that presents lines of one to three words, but that isn’t the case for all the poems.

While there’s eroticism in parts, it’s relatively subtle and shouldn’t be an impediment to any but the primmest of readers. (Though I’ve been known to miscalculate the degree to which some folks get uptight about sexual and somatic content.)

I enjoyed this collection. I was sensual, evocative, and captured the feel of Kerala nicely.

[Junaid]

good

[Aswin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Anita Nair is a master prose writer. However, her first foray into poetry is largely underwhelming. The poems suffer from abstraction, lack of control, and, at times even verbosity. This is in spite of some surprising (and exciting) turns of phrases and occasional word-music.

"A glass lamp, an egg, spilled its yolk of light. "

'Malabar Mind', set in Malabar, a place that I identify as home, was also unsuccessful in bringing the geography and cultural pulse of the place to the forefront. It surfaces occasionally through grounded references, but these occurrences are woefully uneven.

Nair's voice is at its best when it assumes a strange and unexpected character, not unlike in her novels. Despite the blurb's declaration that the collection was in production over a decade, I just wish it underwent another, sterner round of deliberation and revision.

[Shweta Ganesh Kumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some thoughts on this slender volume of poems

1. I enjoyed Malabar Mind, Vulcan in Brindavan, a Baga imprint and The cosmopolitan crow.
2. I feel Anita Nair’s prose is so much stronger than her verse.
3. Most of the poems were well-written but were so abstract and I believe would have translated better if there was at least a line of context. Without which they were just beautiful words placed next to each other.
4. The poems dedicated to specific people and there are quite a few, seemed to be personal conversations between her and them and added here just to pad the volume. With the notable exception of Twenty Fellows.
5. I would have liked a lot more of Malabar than I got in this collection called Malabar Mind.
6. The collection has more of a ‘cow’ or a ‘bovine’ theme rather than a Malabar theme.