‘This Could Be a Love Poem for You’: Poems that acknowledge the transient and grapple with mortality

In This Could Be a Love Poem for You, her fourth collection of verse, Ranu Uniyal offers a powerful poetic account of her wrestling with the profound sense of loss that pervades her everyday existence. Sometimes this loss is highly personal, and several of the volume’s most moving poems deal with the passing of the poet’s mother, but the poignancy of such personal responses to bereavement expands outwards into a more fundamental grappling with mortality, rooted in a feeling that her own existence is transient.

Her mother has been her “passport to life”, teaching her to be herself and providing her with the space to dream her own dreams, and the depth of her distress at her demise is accompanied by a sense of internal loss, the loss of that portion of self that departs when those dearest to us pass on. In a poem entitled “I Cannot Answer”, Uniyal entertains the possibilities that Alzheimer’s and a lonely funeral may await her, but remains “cling[ing] to life”. Elsewhere, she is plagued by grief, personified as a smirking stalker that remains omnipresent despite the passing of time. On “good days”, there is a temporary reprieve, but grief remains inescapable and she dreads its return.

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