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Fire
Wheel by Sharmila Voorakkara Winner of the 2003 Akron Poetry Prize 90 pp., 6 x 9 |
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| Sharmila
Voorakkara’s family poems are tough-minded, sometimes angry,
often elegiac, detailing the sad fate of her father who sells vacuum
cleaners door to door, or serves as a night watchman, or takes up the
holy life as an ascetic with begging bowl. An uncle takes a knife to
his wife’s face: “What mirror didn’t
throw back the
reminder / of what he could do if / he willed it?”
Don’t look here for traditional
lyricism. A
transvestite, some circus freaks, a man splintering windshields with a
baseball bat, a howling woman insane with grief salt and pepper this
collection with Voorakkara’s highly original tropes:
“[B]elieve me, / in the marble cathedrals of / spring lambs /
we
exist, / we amplify, we can’t / be saved / from
elation.”
And there is elation for the reader who encounters these highly unusual
poems with their unexpected enjambments, street savvy diction, and a
hard look at “Dangerous joy!” In Sharmila Voorakkara’s Fire
Wheel,
we meet a cast of characters not so much deranged as charged with an
energy and longing of scant use to them or the world. Hapless and
haunted, anguished and angry, they dance from hope to despair. Whether
they are an “invalid veteran, shawled / in the blue cathode
of
talk shows” or a woman stranded by roadside, “hood
thrown
open / on a stupor of smoke as the car gives up / the ghost,”
their lives are lifted up by an empathic, passionate voice that lilts
and warps. Stand back, from these pages a wild and beautiful singing
bursts forth. |
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Sharmila Voorakkara, a native of New Jersey, earned an M.F.A in creative writing from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. A recipient of a Hall Poetry Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, she is now an assistant professor of English at Ohio University. Fire Wheel is her first book. |
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