Ulrike Narwani's beautifully designed book Collecting Silence, with its pale green-blue cover and floating white flowers, leads us to experience a sensual and vivid poetic world. Her poem"Netsuke" defined as "Miniature sculptures....highly prized as exquisite art objects" can stand as an image for the precise and exquisite details of landscape and location that plunge the reader into a world of sight, sound and smell:
"Newcomers" such a clear picture of this place.
Sun pugnacious
Stray dogs, plastic bags,
faint smell of dahl and rice,
car exhaust, heat, honking.
"Anniversary" provides a close natural observation of a common animal that resonates with the pleasure of celebrating a 40 year anniversary. The stuff of the natural world integrates seamlessly with the joyful experience of a long relationship.
A squirrel
grey as a weathered fence
tail, flicks of butternut gold
grasps in its paws a dried corn cob
rushes off.
As well as her precise and concrete descriptions, Ulrike skillfully presents unusual word patterns and observations.
from "Frolic": I pick up a stone and throw it as far as I can. It turns bird,
many birds with bright wings. I ride their song.
The reader can see a flock of birds arising from a tree in response to a thrown stone.
Her natural imagery leads to a dark undertone:
from "Curriculum Vitae"
I float my broken things down a river in a canoe
made of salted wounds.
We are in a beautiful natural world, that can present us with wonders or terrors.
I am thankful for....
the rising sun
for air
shared
as if that could save us.
from "Good Things."
Narwani offers new ways of seeing familiar plants, animals and natural features like squirrels and trees; new ways of linking our relationships and experiences to the precisely observed concrete world and deeply felt considerations of the human situation that is at times both joyful and tragic; altogether a rich harvest of pleasure and insight.
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