Ranu Uniyal’s Poetic Stories weaved in Time

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The learned professor of a university, Ranu Uniyal, is a scholar and has published some scholarly books besides some edited ones. Her first book of poems, Across the Divide, was published in 2006. December Poems is the second volume of her poetry collection, published in 2012. Though December is a very cold month in Lucknow, a north Indian town, there are reasons for her to celebrate this month for jubilation in her life. “We dance and dance until the wee hours in the morning / Well that is what December nights are for? (Winter Blues/ 25) For her it is “A time to celebrate and the time to venerate . . . . Looking ahead” (December/ 29) Elsewhere it is “Everlasting Moment’s Bliss” (December/ 30)
Apart from the December episodes hidden in her life, the poems here are not disjoined single pieces of ideas and experiences. There is an underlying unity and continuity of experiences in these ebullient poems of joy and grief and passion through which one may get an idea of the flow of a poet’s life in her youth, education life and ahead of it in love and lust, frustration and despair; a fair looking damsel as she was. Somewhere it is a look back at her life’s half forgotten days and an effort to fix the life’s moorage somewhere in maturity, in trying to find a solace in it through reasonable adjustments; not just poems but a weaving of underlying stories wrought in prose poems with rhythm and joy even out of temporary failures. These are mostly poems of relationships though not necessarily aimed at conjugal ones or amoral only like that of Kamala Das.
A number of poems are relating to the memory of the poet’s father with whom she had a close relationship. She also r...

... middle of paper ...

...ft of life,
Life is precious and only love can take its place on this earth.
(Before the storm/ 57)
But let us not be confused with the word love for here the love is not that pinpointed love for the lover of a youth which she expressed so meaningfully, “Everywhere, it is you and suddenly no image is without you.” (Between Us /24) Here the love has expanded its horizon to embrace many more persons and things in life including the divine. Ranu Uniyal has loved life with passion and has seen it from different angles, aching and suffering as she was. Finally she came to some adjustments with life’s changing circumstances and has found solace in God as it is futile to expect it from anybody else. Her poems with interwoven stories draws a reader close to her poetry.

Works Cited

December Poems. Ranu Uniyal. Kolkata; Writers Workshop. 2012
© Aju Mukhopadhyay, 2013

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