Cyborg Proverbs

by Nitoo Das

These eyes are mine. They will also be yours. Das' poetry more than delivers on the promise made in the penultimate lines of her titular Cyborg Proverbs, offering its reader the gift of penetrating (in)sight through thoughts "as precise as suspicion". Her syllables breathe aloud, like hushes that unassumingly gasp in the gaps between echoes, in the interstitial moments of alighting bird wings, or roots that braid the air, or the slipperiness of netted fish, and the gush of rain as it nestles its way into the crevices of walls and swells its way through its parasitical, residential act. Das exquisitely reimagines syntax and her frequently anthropomorphic poems shape-shift upon each ensuing page, making Cyborg Proverbs an enviable feat, aided in no small measure by her studied, patient, bird-watcher gaze and her unspeakable lust for articulating the tacitly sensual. Rosalyn D'Mello Author, A Handbook For My Lover

110 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Catherine Edmunds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nitoo Das is the best poet to write about birds (and about so much more than just birds) since Ted Hughes wrote the seminal ‘From the Life and Songs of the Crow’. I don’t make the comparison lightly. Hughes’ ‘Crow’ launched the reader directly into an explosion of human experience. Das’ ‘Cyborg Proverbs’ does the same thing, but in a uniquely female way. Her sensuality is a million miles from that patriarchal invention, the eternal feminine; but instead is something utterly earthly—it is the rain, it is the birds, it is sex. And it is beautiful. Sometimes so quiet and still, as in the penultimate poem, perhaps my favourite of the entire collection: ‘When a man kisses a tree’, which contains the exquisite lines: ‘An ache for tree bark / fractured like the soles of his mother’s feet’. There is also room for in this collection for the delightfully commonplace. I laughed out loud at the description of headphones—‘I grow out of ears’. But what will stay with me most are the landscapes of flowers, the rain, the tears, the dirt and the beauty—and the birds.