Gauri Deshpande’s Between Births: Poetic Sensibility

A poem is a composite art symbol and is a signature of aesthetic competent. Gauri Deshpande excels in her poetic creativity and the fabric of sensibility that she articulates is not only significant but is also innovative. The enduring quality of her poetry is not only a sum total of past heritage but is also referential, expressive and connotative. Gauri Deshpande is a name that the critic and the reader of Indian English Poetry can not by-pass without leaving a conspicuous lacuna in his repertoire. As for her post of prestige in the tradition of the genre, she is, no doubt, with Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu and Kamala Das, comfortably bolstered up by the merit and the body of work that she has to her name. The structural manipulation of a poem is equally interesting and the canon of her English Poetry so far includes three collections, namely, Between Births (1968), Lost Love (1970), and Beyond The Slaughter House (1972) with a total of eighty poem, presumably and hopefully excluding the ones not published and not anthologised so far, depict the female psyche as well as the imagery with which her primary concerns are underlined. To mark out the singular feature of each of these collections, separate slots are assigned to each.

Between Births was published in 1968 and has twenty-six poems. The first poem Death explores the heart of the beloved who is impatiently waiting for her “a tardy lover for surrender”. The beloved knows that love is a route to death – death of freedom, death of individuality and death of one’s peculiar whims but still she is determined for the holy seven steps that will “Make him/my ally”(18-19). Unlike feminist poets like Kamala Das, Gauri Deshpande believes that love is conjugality, bliss, togetherness as s...

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... is a road to spirituality but for Gauri Deshpande love leads to spirituality but for spirituality sex is not mandatory. What makes the two women stand face to face is their candidness with which they explore the functioning of a feminine soul and a psyche in the sway of sexual urge.

Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simon de .The Second Sex.:H.M.Parshley. NewYork:Random House,1968

Chavan, Sunanda.The Fair Voice:A Study Of Indian Women Poets in English.New Delhi:Sterling Publishers,1984.

Deshpane,Gauri. Between Births.Calcutta:WritersWorkshop,1968.

Kaufmanns, Linda S. “The Long Goodbye :Against Personal Testimony or an Infant Grifter Grows Up”in American Feminist Thoughts at Century’s End: A Reader.Oxford:Blackwell Publishers,1992

Leavis Queenie Fiction And The Public Reading.Scrutiny:Chatto and Windus,1965.

Le Guim,Yusula .The Mother Tongue.New York :Basic Books,1968.