{"id":5155,"date":"2015-12-29T02:25:21","date_gmt":"2015-12-29T01:25:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5155"},"modified":"2016-01-23T14:20:07","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T13:20:07","slug":"mona-arshi-small-hands-pavilion-poetry-9-99-reviewed-by-ken-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5155","title":{"rendered":"Mona Arshi, Small Hands<\/em> (Pavilion Poetry) \u00a39.99, reviewed by Ken Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mona Arshi\u2019s debut collection Small Hands\u00a0<\/i>won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and her relatively short poetic CV is a comet-tail of successes: Magma Competition prize 2012, joint winner of the Manchester Poetry prize 2014, an award in the Troubadour \u2013 she has traced a brilliant trajectory in a short time. Having heard her read but only more closely reading her debut collection for this review, I am brought to mind how she uses words like a watercolourist.From the middle of the \u2018gallery\u2019 she invites us to enter, she makes large canvases, unafraid of the \u2018big themes\u2019 \u2013 death, love, identity, belonging, family, marriage, childhood \u2013 often bleeding out to the edges of these, as in a watercolour, into whimsy or the surreal.<\/p>\n

Arshi generally eschews the didactic, with the exception of the final poem, \u2018Ballad of the Small-boned Daughter\u2019, a cri de coeur about a much-publicised honour-killing, which can hardly fail to draw our sympathy. Yet somehow it feels out of kilter with the tenor of the rest of this debut, and placed at the end, seems to give the collection a clarion-call sign-off that is unrepresentative of the rest of the book.<\/p>\n

This is because, more typically, after creating her broad canvas, Arshi takes us \u2018close-up\u2019, in-laying the big, broad \u2018washes\u2019 of her themes with a particularity and precision that is personal and delicate. The overall effect, in combination, is of an elliptical, gentle, yet serious persuasiveness. What may seem slight at first sight, builds momentum as you progress through the collection, until that final, worthy but for me, \u2018missed\u2019 beat. Arshi usually draws you in, slowly, but insistently. The final poem seems to want to collar us more directly and seek to propel us out into the world, as if her polished interiors are suddenly not enough for her; that her work must claim some more externally verifiable \u2018meaning\u2019 or rationale.<\/p>\n

Words such as \u2018gentle\u2019 and \u2018whimsy\u2019 can, of course, suggest fey or lightweight. Arshi, however, reminds us gentle need not mean \u2018soft\u2019. She can be at her most satisfying to read when being sardonic or using tongue-in-cheek mockery, as in \u2018Bad Day at the Office\u2019, where the demands of motherhood (\u2018Everywhere there is a stink of baby\u2019) and domestic drudgery, (\u2018I can\u2019t smell my fingers as they\u2019ve been wrapped\/in those marigolds for weeks\u2019) seem to be driving the suburban narrator (reading her glossy magazine article about winter veg.) slowly mad, till she imagines the \u2018salsify is eye-balling me\u2019 and the pet \u2018sodding bunny blames me.\u2019 One can almost hear househusbands and housewives everywhere cheering at the end of Arshi reading this. It satisfyingly sustains comedy, or satire, and tragedy, to the end, reminding us, \u2018that when it rains\/it is not catastrophic it is just raining,\u2019 even when the voice on the radio appears \u2013 in our solipsistic silliness – to be addressing us.<\/p>\n

The poet\u2019s, \u2018What Every Girl Should Know About Marriage,\u2019 gives us a similarly jaundiced view of marital union, in the mock-tone of what might purport to be a Victorian self-help manual for \u2018Young Ladies.\u2019 The opening line tells you: \u2018Eliminating thought verbs is the key to successful marriage.\u2019 Instead, you should practise \u2018curbing your interest in the interior of things,\u2019 to the droll\/sinister end-lines of \u2018Your husband may not know you cheated with shop-\/bought garam masala but God will know.\u2019<\/p>\n

These funny and satirical lines, her imaginative flights into the surreal, her \u2018list\u2019 poems such as \u2018On Ellington Road\u2019, and the heart-felt candour of her bereavement poems for her brother (\u2018In the Coroner\u2019s Office\u2019 and \u201818th<\/sup>. Of November\u2019), and the occasional more didactic tone addressing contemporary issues, illustrate that above all, Arshi is a versatile stylist, able to throw her voice into many moods and guises.<\/p>\n

As a child of immigrant parents, she shares a second-generation, slightly, \u2018semi-detached,\u2019 outsider\u2019s interest \u2013 almost a scientific, forensic one – in the technicalities of the language and there is clear evidence of a love of playing with the possibilities of its poetic forms. This correspond to some extent with Daljit Nagra\u2019s experimentations in hybridising and \u2018borrowing\u2019 both the heritage and the \u2018second-language\u2019, in Nagra\u2019s case to write a unique kind of \u2018Pun-glish\u2019 or \u2018Eng-jabi\u2019.<\/p>\n

In Arshi\u2019s case, it is as if the English language is the \u2018mother-ship\u2019 from which\u00a0 she can \u2013 no, it\u2019s more than this – which freely permits her, to space-walk out to and back from, her own heritage, its geographical, cultural, linguistic and religious complexities – as well as the poetic, something clearly marked in the two poems titled \u2018Ghazal\u2019, after the Urdu form originating in North India and Pakistan.<\/p>\n

In the second of these ghazals, hybridization, assimilation and synthesis seems completely achieved: the ghazal is not required to be metrically rigid in English, but is translated for the second language\u2019s purposes, and also has a Spanish epigraph from Lorca (aagain, in English translation.) Arshi writes in the second stanza:<\/p>\n

\u2018I want to sequester words, hold them in stress positions,
\nforeignate them, string them up to ripen on vines\u2019<\/p>\n

Small Hands<\/i> seems to offer an early ripening of what promises to be a vintage trip into \u2018foreignation.\u2019
\n 
\nKen Evans<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mona Arshi\u2019s debut collection Small Hands\u00a0won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and her relatively short poetic CV is a comet-tail of successes: Magma Competition prize 2012, joint winner of the Manchester Poetry prize 2014, an award in the Troubadour \u2013 she has traced a brilliant trajectory in a short time. Having heard her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nMona Arshi, Small Hands (Pavilion Poetry) \u00a39.99, reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5155\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mona Arshi, Small Hands (Pavilion Poetry) \u00a39.99, reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mona Arshi\u2019s debut collection Small Hands\u00a0won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and her relatively short poetic CV is a comet-tail of successes: Magma Competition prize 2012, joint winner of the Manchester Poetry prize 2014, an award in the Troubadour \u2013 she has traced a brilliant trajectory in a short time. 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