After Elegy: Review of 'Dear Big Gods' by Mona Arshi
There’s no ordained route through bereavement, and Mona Arshi’s latest collection, Dear Big Gods, continues the elegy and memorial for her brother Deepak, started in her 2014 work, Small Hands.
In this second collection there’s a reflection on the five-year anniversary, ‘Five-Year Update’, a poem turned 45 degrees due to its line length, yes, but also mirroring the way Arshi visits and experiences the separation from her brother from every angle in this book. The poem is written with the intimacy of a letter, ‘I hope it’s fine to contact you, to tell you that I still watch the gaps in the carriages’. She refers to him as, ‘O supersonic boy’, and reveals the continual presence of her brother, how she relives not only the loss, ‘Five years ago the American women overheard my call just before Colchester.’, but also incidents from their lives, ‘remember we counted yellow cars in our Fiat 128,’.
In addition to the unusual layout of Five-Year Update, Arshi uses a variety of forms and layouts to emulate grief and loss. I had a sense that the range is akin to a search to express the unspeakable from many perspectives (‘The Humble Insistence’ is right-justified; ‘Tanka: I Loved You Best in Spring’; ‘Something’, in two columns’; ‘Dear Big Gods’ right-justified and indented.)
Throughout the collection Arshi gives a sense of her brother’s presence becoming more pervasive. An omnipresence is hinted at in flashbacks in for instance, ‘The Wasps’, and there’s a sense of porosity between this world in which she’s living and the afterlife. She communicates this powerfully in poems such as, ‘A Pear from the Afterlife’, “Too bad you have to go back,’ I say, / and he sighs like an old man’; and in ‘Everywhere’,
After rain, we lift up sheets of
canvas, nothing stirs,
like our own private church.
We expect no answer –
though he must be there.
Poems stagger between the liminal entering and leaving the world, ‘Ask anyone who’s experienced birth pangs or / reverse birth pangs’ (‘Because you left no note’)
A sense of lamentation is created through the repetition of motifs of fruit, flowers, and creatures: ‘Narcissi’; ‘The Lilies’; ‘The Wasps’; ‘Fish’; ‘A Pear from the Afterlife’; ‘In Mexico the women are marrying trees’; ‘Now I know the Truth about Octopuses’; ‘The Mango’; ‘Let the Parts of the Flower Speak’; and ‘Pomegranate’.
Dear Big Gods explores aftermath: the continued elegy, prayers, memorial; and a deepening of the presence of the lost one. Grief is personal and specific, and Arshi successfully and movingly immerses us in her unique experience of loss. It’s a book for both those who have read, Small Hands and those new to Mona Arshi’s writing.
