{"id":6501,"date":"2016-06-20T09:56:31","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T08:56:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6501"},"modified":"2017-08-21T13:25:47","modified_gmt":"2017-08-21T12:25:47","slug":"amali-rodrigo-lotus-gatherers-bloodaxe-9-95-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6501","title":{"rendered":"Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers<\/em>, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"
Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers<\/em>,(Bloodaxe Books, \u00a39.95).<\/h5>\n

The blurb to Amali Rodrigo\u2019s first collection, Lotus Gatherers<\/em>, comments \u2018the lotus flower embodies the promise of purity and transcendence because it rises clear out of the muddy mire of its origins. It represents both abstract realms and the concrete phenomenal world.\u00a0 The lotus root is also an aphrodisiac.\u2019\u00a0 In Greek mythology, the lotus is associated with the dreamy apathy of the tribe of lotus eaters met by Odysseus in the Odyssey.\u00a0 There is sometimes a dreamy quality to some of Rodrigo\u2019s writing, but it is never apathetic.\u00a0 What it is, though, is often sinuous and dense.<\/p>\n

The poem, \u2018The Bell is always Ringing, for example, is forty five lines long, and consists of three sentences, the first of which is thirty four lines long.\u00a0 The lines are quite short, but, it might be contended, they need to be.\u00a0 This poem is characteristic of some of Rodrigo\u2019s method, which is to take an idea and then work it out, almost centripetally.\u00a0 Thus the first ten lines or so of this poem are as follows, \u2018If, to hear is a long\/ gathering\u2019s interruption\/ of this this this<\/em> – \/ not tongling<\/em> bronze, not the iron cast heft\/ of a house, not a zhong<\/em> bell\u2019s two\/ exact tones, but perhaps like\/ someone caught\/ in a small act of love,\/ or the trace of a day he held\/ a hint of at the far end\/ of a hallway, she, panicking\/ out of sight in a blur\/ of bridal white,\/ and how smug\/ they were of reflex\/ superstitions:\u2019 This is one long conditional clause, which finishes with a colon and then is not followed by a main clause.\u00a0 The writing begins with the suggestion that \u2018to hear\u2019 is an interruption of something which it is not,<\/u> the sound of a bell, which itself is not the sound of a house, but it is \u2018perhaps\u2019 a trace of a hint of a female persona who is out of sight in a blur of \u2018bridal white\u2019 with a smug sense of \u2018reflex superstitions\u2019.\u00a0 To paraphrase the lines in this way is to risk parody, of course.\u00a0 And to pick out such lines when the whole book is clearly more disparate is to risk sending up Rodrigo\u2019s whole project.\u00a0 But there is an element of risk in this book which Rodrigo does not always quash.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, and to my mind, more successfully, Rodrigo focuses more fully on things as opposed to ideas.\u00a0 \u2018Ossuary\u2019, for example begins with a lovely, atmospheric description of the passage of time in the ossuary, \u2018One bone fell upon another\/ as a loved body deranged,\/ femur to humerus, mandible\/ to radius, to lie apart from faint\/ quakes of loincloth spill, tinsel\/ voices gone inside out, as if\/ small hands of ash dropped\/ through skin into salt longings.\u2019 Here those lovely images of \u2018loincloth spill\u2019 and \u2018small hands of ash\u2019 are, firstly, earned within the syntax, and, secondly, deftly placed within a narrative which is both evocative and moving.<\/p>\n

The central section of the book is \u2018from Aftersongs\u2019 which are short, haiku-like poems \u2018based\u2019 on graffiti written contemporaneously on the walls of a fifth century pleasure palace built in Sri Lanka. The poems, addressed to the women in the palace, are sensuously and warmly rendered by Rodrigo.\u00a0 And, while they are (perhaps) the graffiti of men writing about the women, Rodrigo\u2019s poems are a lively recognition of the sense of desire between the sexes. One such is, \u2018The man whose lust is rewarded\/ by this gold-skinned girl \u2013 isn\u2019t he as one\/ who, having warmed himself by the fire, lays down his head in it?\u2019 Another, even shorter goes, \u2018Cast among glowing coals, \/ gold too shall melt.\u2019 In these poems, there is a neat, clear focus which Rodrigo uses with considerable aplomb to depict not \u2018the war between the sexes\u2019, but both the dangers and the rewards of such desire.<\/p>\n

Ian Pople<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers,(Bloodaxe Books, \u00a39.95). The blurb to Amali Rodrigo\u2019s first collection, Lotus Gatherers, comments \u2018the lotus flower embodies the promise of purity and transcendence because it rises clear out of the muddy mire of its origins. It represents both abstract realms and the concrete phenomenal world.\u00a0 The lotus root is also an aphrodisiac.\u2019\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"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":"\nAmali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers, reviewed by Ian Pople - 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=6501\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers,(Bloodaxe Books, \u00a39.95). 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