How ‘Lost Tongues speak with Forceful New Accents’: Poetry of Ranu Uniyal

Book Review by Dr. Nishi Pulugurtha

Title: The Day We Went Strawberry Picking in Scarborough

Author: Ranu Uniyal

Publisher: Dhauli Book, 2018

Ranu Uniyal, an academic teaching at Lucknow University, is an important poetic and literary voice writing in India. Her poems speak of the human experience, of sufferings, love, pain, angst, unfulfilled desires and unsaid thoughts. Uniyal’s poems give voice to feelings and expressions that reach out. The Day We Went Strawberry Picking in Scarborough is Uniyal’s third volume of poems after December Poems (2012) and Across the Divide (2006).

Professor John Thieme, a postcolonial scholar and critic from University of East Anglia, describes the poems in the volume as “Circling around tart and tough memories” saying that the poems in the volume under consideration “reinvigorate the possibilities of elegiac verse”. He adds, “Lost tongues speak with forceful new accents, making Ranu Uniyal one of the most original voices writing in India today.”