Poetry review – DEAR LIFE: Jennifer Johnson admires the broad and compassionate scope of a major collection by Shanta Acharya
Dear Life
Shanta Acharya
LWL Books
ISBN 9798218465247
120pp £8.95 (Paperback); £5.95 (Kindle); £21.95 (Hardback)
Dear Life is Shanta Acharya 13th book and her eighth collection of poems. Her writing therefore has the ‘long foreground’ Emerson said must have been true of Walt Whitman’s work. Shanta Acharya has written on the influence of Indian thought on Emerson, and this shows a dual identity grounded in an intellectual understanding of Indian and Western traditions as well as that which comes from the poet’s extensive life experience in both cultures. Acharya’s poems, however, are not restricted to the places she knows best but cover regions such as Palestine, Syria and Russia. The poems are accessible with any unfamiliar words explained in the glossary.
The collection is a rich one and, sadly, I only have space to look at a tiny fraction of its poems. I want to start with the title poem “Dear Life” in which the poet delightfully considers words as beings who like to rebel.
My words I minister to like my children
offer them the freedom to be themselves –
warn them of risks from the moment they are born,
their very existence an act of rebellion.
Their bones breathe the mystery of the universe,
summoning all to love the way singing does.
I’m haunted by the enormity of their grief –
of the equal and opposite possibility of limitless joy…
These lines show the importance of certain themes to the poet including those of mystery, love, grief and joy. The collection covers subjects ranging from the personal through concern for those who suffer injustice and onwards to spiritual matters. Various poetic forms are used ranging from couplets, triplets, sonnets, and other forms including a prose-poem, “Going Nowhere ..for Joy Harjo”.
Beginnings, very different from those in Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”, are also important for the poet. “Always Beginning” is a pantoum that urges us ‘to find the resolve to be always beginning’ and states that ‘In time everything changes, even our perception of truth’. In the poem “From the Book of Transformation”, for instance, we are told that ‘even a mighty river is a child entering the world’.
The second poem in the collection is the sonnet length “Something To Do With Love” which is set in the physically restricted world of the Covid lockdown. It begins
Surveying the locked down map of my world,
windows opening to landscapes of uncertainty,
time dances like a god in the changing light.
The word ‘dances’ suggests the god Shiva who is associated with both creation and destruction but not named here. Opposites are important in many poems in the collection and in this one we are told ‘As the death toll rises/so do fear and courage’ and ‘believing in blue skies, bird song/and spring in the dreadful winter of our hearts’. The words certainly fit with the last quoted couplet in the “Dear Life” poem above.
The third poem is “Loneliness”, a hard-hitting poem that deals with a common experience regarded by some medical professionals as being as harmful as smoking. This poem begins ‘A professional assassin, strikes without warning, / works with exaggerated slowness and precision’, and later we are told that it ‘sucks the energy/out of me’. It seems in the early part of the poem that there is no ‘possibility of limitless joy’ but, after a few lines ‘Lying under the duvet, grief torn, I marvel /at shafts of light that lean in like angels of mercy.’ These ‘shafts of light’ reappear in “Solitude” which begins in a very different frame of mind:
Finding myself in this paradise of solitude,
I discover continents in the embrace of solitude.
Shafts of sunlight, startled by the beauty of gods
displaced, play in sacred spaces of solitude.
The ‘opposite’ experience to ‘limitless joy’ is expressed in “We are all returning”, a poem about the loss of the poet’s brother when ‘A roll of the dice suddenly changed everything./ We were unprepared for such a cosmic glitch.’
Terrible events that have befallen others make up part of the collection. One particularly horrific story is that of “The Tree Huggers”. It is based on an event that took place in 1730 and begins ‘When soldiers come to cut down the trees / for wood to build the Maharaja’s palace’. It ends with the tree huggers being ‘beheaded by the Maharaja’s soldiers’.
Some of the poems invite us to link two traditions as in “Be the Gods” whose ‘divine forces’ have been ‘conjured to destroy evil’. Durga was only made possible because ‘It took all the gods to conceive of such a deity/just as it takes a village to raise a child.’
Acharya compares spiritual beliefs in different traditions in “Song of Praise – prayers from different traditions”. Everything in the poem is carefully made accessible to Western readers. To take one example, in the line ‘Praise the eye of the guest-clear observant’ the word ‘guest’ may suggest the writings of Kabir but it works on a spiritual level without that knowledge.
In “Things” the poet expresses her awe of the scale of the universe compared to our interior cosmos. It begins ‘Inside each of us are galaxies of things / known only to the god of infinite things.’ Later the reader is told ‘The journey within is vast as the one without’.
Dear Life is a rich and rewarding collection due to the poet’s expression of experiences profoundly felt and considered. The book begins with a dedication to her brother Susanta and some beautiful quotations from Dickinson, Blake, Milosz and Tagore which are perhaps signposts to some important influences on the poet. Essentially, Shanta Acharya’s poetry can be said to concern everything that is summed up in the poem title “This Is Where We Learn What It Means To Be Human”. For instance, in “Weathering” the reader is told “Weathering is what we are here for” and it is such hard-won wisdom that makes Dear Life a collection I would highly recommend.
Feb 24 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Shanta Acharya
Poetry review – DEAR LIFE: Jennifer Johnson admires the broad and compassionate scope of a major collection by Shanta Acharya
Dear Life is Shanta Acharya 13th book and her eighth collection of poems. Her writing therefore has the ‘long foreground’ Emerson said must have been true of Walt Whitman’s work. Shanta Acharya has written on the influence of Indian thought on Emerson, and this shows a dual identity grounded in an intellectual understanding of Indian and Western traditions as well as that which comes from the poet’s extensive life experience in both cultures. Acharya’s poems, however, are not restricted to the places she knows best but cover regions such as Palestine, Syria and Russia. The poems are accessible with any unfamiliar words explained in the glossary.
The collection is a rich one and, sadly, I only have space to look at a tiny fraction of its poems. I want to start with the title poem “Dear Life” in which the poet delightfully considers words as beings who like to rebel.
These lines show the importance of certain themes to the poet including those of mystery, love, grief and joy. The collection covers subjects ranging from the personal through concern for those who suffer injustice and onwards to spiritual matters. Various poetic forms are used ranging from couplets, triplets, sonnets, and other forms including a prose-poem, “Going Nowhere ..for Joy Harjo”.
Beginnings, very different from those in Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”, are also important for the poet. “Always Beginning” is a pantoum that urges us ‘to find the resolve to be always beginning’ and states that ‘In time everything changes, even our perception of truth’. In the poem “From the Book of Transformation”, for instance, we are told that ‘even a mighty river is a child entering the world’.
The second poem in the collection is the sonnet length “Something To Do With Love” which is set in the physically restricted world of the Covid lockdown. It begins
The word ‘dances’ suggests the god Shiva who is associated with both creation and destruction but not named here. Opposites are important in many poems in the collection and in this one we are told ‘As the death toll rises/so do fear and courage’ and ‘believing in blue skies, bird song/and spring in the dreadful winter of our hearts’. The words certainly fit with the last quoted couplet in the “Dear Life” poem above.
The third poem is “Loneliness”, a hard-hitting poem that deals with a common experience regarded by some medical professionals as being as harmful as smoking. This poem begins ‘A professional assassin, strikes without warning, / works with exaggerated slowness and precision’, and later we are told that it ‘sucks the energy/out of me’. It seems in the early part of the poem that there is no ‘possibility of limitless joy’ but, after a few lines ‘Lying under the duvet, grief torn, I marvel /at shafts of light that lean in like angels of mercy.’ These ‘shafts of light’ reappear in “Solitude” which begins in a very different frame of mind:
The ‘opposite’ experience to ‘limitless joy’ is expressed in “We are all returning”, a poem about the loss of the poet’s brother when ‘A roll of the dice suddenly changed everything./ We were unprepared for such a cosmic glitch.’
Terrible events that have befallen others make up part of the collection. One particularly horrific story is that of “The Tree Huggers”. It is based on an event that took place in 1730 and begins ‘When soldiers come to cut down the trees / for wood to build the Maharaja’s palace’. It ends with the tree huggers being ‘beheaded by the Maharaja’s soldiers’.
Some of the poems invite us to link two traditions as in “Be the Gods” whose ‘divine forces’ have been ‘conjured to destroy evil’. Durga was only made possible because ‘It took all the gods to conceive of such a deity/just as it takes a village to raise a child.’
Acharya compares spiritual beliefs in different traditions in “Song of Praise – prayers from different traditions”. Everything in the poem is carefully made accessible to Western readers. To take one example, in the line ‘Praise the eye of the guest-clear observant’ the word ‘guest’ may suggest the writings of Kabir but it works on a spiritual level without that knowledge.
In “Things” the poet expresses her awe of the scale of the universe compared to our interior cosmos. It begins ‘Inside each of us are galaxies of things / known only to the god of infinite things.’ Later the reader is told ‘The journey within is vast as the one without’.
Dear Life is a rich and rewarding collection due to the poet’s expression of experiences profoundly felt and considered. The book begins with a dedication to her brother Susanta and some beautiful quotations from Dickinson, Blake, Milosz and Tagore which are perhaps signposts to some important influences on the poet. Essentially, Shanta Acharya’s poetry can be said to concern everything that is summed up in the poem title “This Is Where We Learn What It Means To Be Human”. For instance, in “Weathering” the reader is told “Weathering is what we are here for” and it is such hard-won wisdom that makes Dear Life a collection I would highly recommend.