The hallmark of an excellent poem is that you want to read it again and again. And if a bunch of such poems are brought together, no matter how thematically coherent or consistent the arrangement, reading the collection from cover to cover becomes an onerous task. Every poem forces you to stay with it. It takes effort to abandon a poem to move on to the next one. This I guess should be the hallmark of an excellent collection of poems. Folie A Deux, which is the first collection of Jennifer Robertson’s poems, distinctly carries this hallmark. 

The purpose of a review is to let a reader know in advance what she is getting into. To get a sense of what the texture of the reading experience is going to be. In this spirit, it is perfectly reasonable to ask before picking up this book what kind of a poet Jennifer Robertson is. Fortunately for us, she herself drops a hint in a poem called ‘Bleu’. It is not uncharacteristic of poets to drop such hints in their work about what they are trying to do. At times these hints sound like pompous proclamations but sometimes they take the form of a beautiful image that sticks. An image so vivid and precise that fellow writers wish to have come up with it to define their writing. Here is Jennifer’s hint — 

Somewhere in the distance,

a leaf falls

and displaces its shadow. 

I have been looking for that shadow

and writing of that fall. 

If it were a pronouncement (I’m sure it is not) no one would have held it against the poet. Almost every poem in this collection is the evidence of this search — this looking for that shadow consumed by the very thing that gave birth to it. Unsurprisingly, the collection is dedicated to her parents. 

Theme 

There’s a myriad of themes explored in the collection. It’s hard enough to ascribe a specific theme to an individual poem. To try and do it for a collection is futile. But I couldn’t help but notice an unmistakable undercurrent of violence running through some of the poems. At times it is evoked through a terse remark — 

I could talk about the woman

who had facial scrapes, bruises and cuts. 

All minor injuries. 

But let’s talk about the SONY India web page instead. 

At times as a subtle observation — 

I like the tiny economies of restraint

of not knowing the size of your fist

when the doorbell rings. 

These images also introduce a turn in each of the above poems, which brings me to what I found the most remarkable thing about the collection. 

Craft

Language is a sense-making tool. The more seamlessly ‘sense’ travels through a sentence, the better the prose. In poetry, sense and sound travel together. Often, both are at odds with each other. Good poetry happens when this conflict is resolved. In a way, the practice of poetry can be defined as finding ways of resolving this conflict. There are many poems from this collection that can be held as perfect examples of this practice. Take these lines from a poem titled ‘Pots, Pans, and Metals’ for example — 

Silence

and chrysanthemums rush in 

The sibilant sound is so neatly arranged that the sudden jump in sense from ‘silence’ to the name of a flower is not noticed. Not in an interfering way. Silently these lines slip into the reader’s mind a metaphor she can do some mental munching on. In the same poem there is another set of lines that go like this — 

I hear the free-fall when you pray.

Levity lulls your words

in songs you often slay. 

Each line is a consonantal sound cluster. The first with its ‘r’ sound, the second with ‘l’, and the third with ‘s’ sliding through to the end of the line, rounding it off with an end-rhyme. Is there a thing more pleasurable in poetry than unexpected rhymes? 

This is not the only place in this book where one encounters unexpected sound-play. In a poem called ‘Filming Amnesia in Monochrome’, the speaker describes the contents on panch-phoran, a spice mixture, like this — 

fragrant fennel with a buzz of black mustard; a pinch of nigella; a fallowed flourish of fenugreek with a bit of cumin candour. 

This is the most obvious example of deliberate arrangement of sounds. The book is full of such sound pockets that silently exist without, in any way, coming in the way of sense-making — your palms might mask a meandering intermezzo; buildings, baby bones baffling stone heads; subtly, you say, bit by bit; and so on. 

It is easy for poets to keep self-indulgently playing with sounds, and even some sense, without having any insights from real life. Literature is supposed to act as a magnifying glass to observe reality from up close or see things that otherwise remain tucked in the back-room o hif our consciousness. In many of her poems, Robertson comes across as a keen observer of life. Consider this bit from one of her prose poems — 

In the year 1987, I was riding pillion and my Dad was saying something; his voice was incoherent, I remember. I put my ears against his back. His voice remained muffled but the volume got amplified. 

The amplification of a muffled voice is something we all must have experienced but to accidentally find it in a poem etches the image into the reader’s memory. There is another image that I have not been able to get out of my head. The more I think about it the more interesting it becomes. She writes about void — 

it throbs,

like an incision

a master stylist 

approaching the sublime. 

Sublime is nothing but throbbing of the void. Robertson gives it a concrete form by calling it an incision. It takes an observant as well as imaginative mind to come up with this metaphor. It is at moments like these that one wonders if they are indeed two separate types of minds. 

This collection is also a constellation of different interesting forms. For example, there is a poem called ‘The Relevance of Assorted Wikipedia Lines’ which is composed around a few factual statements from Wikipedia. There is another poem in this collection called ‘Everything That Lived Once Returns to Silence’ which condenses the essence of the entire poem into a single final word — alluvial. In subsequent readings, the word ‘alluvial’ feels like a magic lamp out of which the whole body of the poem emerges like a genie. There is another poem called ‘The Afterlife’ that has a similar effect. 

The only thing that miffed me about this collection are the allusions, especially to movies. The poet seems to have taken for granted the reader’s familiarity not just with the films but also her interpretation of it. For example, ‘a metaphysical moment in a Weerasethakal film’ in a poem appears out of the blue and cinema noobs like me are left stranded with something they cannot imagine. A sudden shift from vivid images to the mind’s black screen sometimes feels jarring. But this is partly due to my lack of exposure to cinema and this probably renders the criticism void. But, if not in a review, where else would a reader register his complaint? I’m sure cinema-literate people would love these allusions. 

For people in love with poetry, especially with the craft of it, this collection is a gift. It was refreshing to read something that drew my sustained attention to the only tool available to poets — language. Nothing more can be said about the book that can trump the actual experience of reading the poems. So, here is a sample of poems from the collection. 

Bleu

You approach me with

an intimate strangeness.

A deeper shade of blue.

You are not constant.

I wonder if I am.

Somewhere in the distance,

a leaf falls

and displaces its shadow.

I have been looking for that shadow

and writing of that fall.

The Afterlife

You move from tongue

to silence with a wanton ordinariness.

I draw a blur across my

face line after line after

line.

This is how we perish

and knock on window panes

like secret,

convulsive

winds.

This is how we mend

a secondary storm: chipped

and clairvoyant.

We then call it beautiful, eternal

unable to find a

synonym or a fluted

word that

disappears

lingers    stays.

The Tiny Economies of Restraint

I like not knowing your

coldness or the length of your

shadow

or the haunted architecture of your face.

I do not want to know the names of cemeteries

you’ve been to, or how the dead walk on

knives.

I like the tiny economies of restraint,

of not knowing the size of your

fist when the doorbell rings.

For I Am a Rain Dog Too

I think of poets

as hoodlums, in rolled up sleeves

and chalky-hands delivering

delinquencies as inheritance,

in containers of

time definite wounds

carefully labelled as:

fragile, benign, malignant.

And yet the writing keels over

a capsized ship,

contaminating the sea with

hazardous cargo.

Fuckin’ Poets. Always making the sea Red.

Always Your Diction, Never You

There is a

crescent-shaped void –

that

overlaps

sometimes

unwittingly.

It sleeps on red

bricks, burns

like charcoal

on sand,

raining

rapidly on my mind. 

It’s a thirst that

lip-syncs, in quick

succession.

An unapproved mumble

There’s an emptiness:

suave,

incisive

torrential

It refuses to fill, refuses to

die. it throbs,

like an

incision a

master stylist

approaching the sublime.

Becoming Lydia Davis

‘What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express

himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of

action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act

violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there

should have been an adjective.’

– Joseph Brodsky

I could list down how Ibuprofen

could be a useful drug:

Non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory. I

could

talk about the man who advised

icing the bruise.

I could talk about the woman

who had facial scrapes, bruises and

cuts. All minor injuries.

But let’s talk about the SONY India web page instead,

that instructs its users to call

1800-103-7799 on all seven days, 9 a.m.

to 7:30 p.m.

So, the man called the toll free number

and reported that his 32 inch EX420

series BRAVIA LCD TV was severely

damaged and was not half as bright as it used

to be.

He was advised that he could either

take the TV apart, sell the PSU

board on OLX.in

or get a second-hand replacement

LCD panel. He decided to sell

the parts and dump the

carcass.

Now, the woman could’ve

caterwauled like a cat in heat but

the woman was smart.

She knew that

vinegar is a good

astringent.

It helps the blood to congeal

Excerpted with permission from Folie Á Deux by Jennifer Roberston published by Paperwall Publishing 2025