Book Review: An Ember from Her Pyre by Shelly Bhoil

By Anurima Chanda 

We see the various stages of birth – the birth of a piece of writing, in Shelly Bhoil’s maiden collection of poems An Ember from Her Pyre. She begins at the beginning, when there exists only the turbulent blank that comes before the beginning. The germs of assorted ideas squirming in the brain, while the mind is still trying to process which one of it needs to be carried for a full term and finally given birth to. This is what the poems in the first section of her book – “The Recalling” give you a sense of. Bhoil seems unafraid to let the reader penetrate deep within the poet’s mind space, where everything is still raw, half-processed and unbaked. It is like the dustbin full of scratched out first lines written down on papers that have now been reduced into crushed little wrinkly balls. Here the poet is not yet a mother, but still the one whose egg has not met its fertilising agent. The “dream” of a poem, the imprint of another poem or poet on your poem, the struggle with words, with meanings, with grammar, the play with form, with diction and with dialects, and the lure of stories heard and memories made – millions of these seeds of ideas ejaculated into the poet’s mind womb is put out on open display as they swim towards the egg trying to reach it before the others.

As we reach the second section of her book – “An Ember from Her Pyre,” the union of the two has occurred. As Bhoil herself writes in “Unstitch”, one of her poems, “the word is pregnant”. The poems in this section are more sure of their existence. They are no longer fragmentary. They have now become full grown foetuses, which the poet has carefully nurtured in “the womb of [the] waters” of the mind. The isolated words that had been floating in the poet’s mind, have now been assimilated through “self-consummation” to narrate stories of their own. These tales have reignited the memories of many a “forgotten story”, given words to many a story that have been guarding painful “secrets”, and encouraged the mute “mannequins” to shake off the weight of “scripted roles” and be born anew as “a bud”. Bhoil has carefully shaken out the ghosts of the yesteryears from her “urn of life” and let them form roots of their own, in order to branch “deeper into the earth” and unearth “saplings” of tales bearing the weight of those experiences that have so long existed only between the lines.