Anand Prahlad

‘dreaming of endangered species.’ 

by Anand Prahlad. This beautiful book.  

I have been lucky – there maybe more to it than that – to get some first class poetry from the US via David Pike’s pulsarpoetry.com, for which I have been reviewing for a couple of years now.  This collection is as good as any new work I’ve come across. A rare piece of writing.  Review out in a few weeks, fanmail in the post. 

18.May.Unluckily formatting issues have left the pulsar review in poor shape. So: 

At first we meet with the poet embraced on a bed of pain, on the cusp of consciousness, articulating a sarcoma which he finds, at times, articulating him. Prahlad’s acutely worded dream-states strike the reader as risen images still directed to their source; in memory, or the memories of ancestors, the prophets and ‘hostile/ tribes / roaming jungles / of my marrow.’ As Lucifer appears in ‘My Bladder’s Dementia:’

You must be
the orchid
lipped one,
mad man lunatic
once favorite
prodigal cast out
you must be
the nimbus
cloud  steam
in the kitchen
a kiss, a clap
of thunder,
the wronged witness
the desperate one
my heart
warned me about
so far away
from home.

The verse bristles with insight and turmoils of the ‘f lesh’. Cocoon finishes:

                        …Am I still
here for real, am I dreaming,
are those wings I hear, an engine
turning, a drill, a door, is this sand
in the dry roof of my mouth, a hand
brushing against my arm, warmth?

At the halfway ‘Bridge,’ there is surgery, the amusing conceit of ‘My Life as a Banned Book’ then we surface in the world. Prahlad’s essentially generous disposition introduces a child’s beating, slave ghosts, the malicious, awful crime of ‘The Platoon’ ‘with whispers in my ears / of freckled boys / in bathroom stalls.’ Here are no vested rights, only realities of experience: sex, death, life in terms of wolves and junkyard, of diagnosis.

No hurry of direction in ‘dreaming of endangered species.’ If a restlessness emerges in the second half – the first so out of time one wouldn’t notice – perhaps it reflects speed of thought, a symptom of living which only makes the verse more human than sublime. The appetites and food on the kitchen table are universally shareable. It’s very fine work.

‘in the shadows / of my hand / a leaf / on bark / on your thigh / i see myself / in a dream / paralyzed / but i think / i can get up / and then / i think I am up. / i think i’m walking…’