Dear Big Gods

by Mona Arshi

Following on from her Forward prize-winning collection, Small Hands, Mona Arshi's new book continues in its lyrical and exact exploration of the aftershocks of grief. These extraordinary poems, which see Arshi continuing with her experiments with form, relocate experiences in both past and future feeling, in both the intimacies of ordinariness and the collective experience of myth. Moving and discomfiting, these poems tune, in their acute emotional awareness of individual pain, to the dangers and unsettling violences of the contemporary world. Nevertheless, at the centre of this book is an overarching commitment to hope, in whatever form it takes, to the earth's tiny creatures, and its 'churning, broken song'.

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

Published April 30, 2019

About the author

Mona Arshi worked as a Human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry. Her debut collection Small Hands won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2015. Mona’s second collection ‘Dear Big Gods’ was published in 2019 (both books published by Liverpool University Press’s Pavilion Poetry list). She has taught and mentored extensively including the Arvon/Jerwood mentorship Programme and the Rebecca Swift Women’s Poetry Prize. Mona has judged both the Forward and TS Eliot prizes as well as the National Poetry Competition . She makes regular appearances on radio and has been commissioned to write both poems and short stories. Her poems and interviews have been published in The Times, The Guardian, Granta and The Times of India as well as on the London Underground. She is currently writer in Residence at Cley Marshes with the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. Her debut novel Somebody Loves You will be published with And Other Stories in Autumn 2021. She has recently been appointed Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool. Mona is currently editing a book of black and Asian poetry ‘Nature Matters’ with Karen McCarthy Woolf which will be published in Spring 2023 by Faber books.

Reviews

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I sit at the kitchen table where
the light is best, where the light is.
As mute as dawn, I blink her out,
examine her hands, ink-stained
and cold, her neck creaking like an
iron hinge cooling on a gate.
I search the patchpockets of
her dress, full of tiny perforated
shells and small yolk-coloured flowers
ruining the lining and I run my fingers along
her back and through her hair which flows
like lava across her pale collarbones.
When I flinch, she flinches, this
soft girl, this churning broken song."

// "Like the first morning"


This is my first time ever reading Mona Arshi and I'm happy to report I really liked her. There is a thread of tenderness linking all these poems, they gently tug and turn, celebrating the small bigness of humanity. It is a record of our tiny acts reflected large, the looming shadows cast behind us. Arshi is searching for recognition through recollection, asking the universe to respond, enjoining the abyss to gaze back at us.

Nature makes its presence known in her poems. Verses are entangled with branches, high boughs shade enjambments, critters of all kinds walk across the pages. So It is brimming with green, overflowing with it. Poems act as remembrance of the past and the mythic, transplanted on the present and the ordinary. Draupadi voicing her inner turmoil & Odysseus with paan-stained teeth, all find space to reside. Arshi plays a bit with form and structure too. An appreciable, intimate, often exquisite collection. Looking forward to more of her.



(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[Josephine Corcoran · Rating 5 out of 5]

The natural world infuses poems in Mona Arshi's second collection with mentions of birds, insects, flowers, trees, rivers, forests, ponds, earth. Flying and crawling insects make an appearance, sometimes landing gently on one line, sometimes swarming across whole pages. There are poems after Lorca and Emily Dickinson, and a playfully self-conscious scent of Louise Gluck's 'The Wild Iris' wafts through several poems when we are not sure who is speaking, flowers or the person observing them. Flashes of humour, when they appear, sometimes in the saddest of times, are brilliant. "Have you ever ridden a penny farthing?" an obstetrician asks in 'Delivery Room'. "Is that important?" the poem's speaker replies, "Will I still get the morphine?". These poems spill over with intimate observations and the exquisite language that is Arshi's trademark. Readers who loved her first book will not be disappointed with her second. My full review is published in Under the Radar magazine, August 2019 and available online at ninearchespress.blogspot.com.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Little prayer / I am still here / hunkered down”. It didn’t seem right to end the year on two of Mona Arshi’s three books, so I thought I’d sneak her second poetry collection Dear Big Gods in at the end, a 366th book (a spiritual leap day?). This is a glorious book and I am thrilled that it will be my final read and review of 2021; from the first poem, Little Prayer’, which begins “It’s me / again. / This time I’m a wren”, Arshi fits in so much goodness, an endless array of affecting lines, rhythms, images: “we begin in the gardens / more baffled by light than darkness”. There is the dense + moving ‘Five-Year Update’, a sporadic, fractured feel in ‘Something’, frantic energy with each syllable of ‘The Wasps’. One poem builds so lovingly on Emily Dickinson’s line “I was the slightest in the house.” The poem ‘Delivery Room’ captures the horror of childbearing with an undeniably propulsive rhythm. In the playful, dreamlike, gorgeous poem ‘Mirrors’, which is derived from Lorca’s Mirror Suite, Arshi writes: “cold collector of bruise / and flounce and / excess breath. / This woozy thirsty surface of want”; later, “In the olden days certain / cursed mirrors were walled up / never destroyed”. Arshi plays with ideas about plot and myth; she evokes Draupadi; she offers up another ghazal and more prose poems; she allows nature and plants to inhabit her work — “So many trees, we sighed, / so much loneliness. In the golden hour we / parted the bark then married them.” There are poems where “my anger is a yellow lake”; the seething ‘Odysseus’ (“God, how I scraped up / my misery and held it / up to the mirror, / a double sacrifice”); ringing notes of hope, as “all you have to do / is show yourself”.

[Julia]

This small collection of poetry covers a variety of topics. While a lot of them were filled with curious imagery, none of then connected strongly with me on a personal level. Many poems were visually arranged in an unusual way, and could be read in different ways.

[Serge ♆ Neptune · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 liked it a bit more than her debut collection.

[dnote · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is okay. Compared to her previous work, I did not like it that much.

[Samoyes · Rating 2 out of 5]

I DNF-ed at page 30. I’m just not sure I like poetry. I couldn’t connect with these poems.