Dear Poemgranates,
What does one do on peering into a poem—or a photograph of an ancestor—and seeing oneself there? What does one do with a precedence like that? Second Memory by Alycia Pirmohamed and Pratyusha is a diaspora epistle standing before poetry, on the very brink, and finding care in such precedence.
Second Memory is an exercise in learning to love. It is about a commitment to “love with clarity.” It is about having stood before the North Saskatchewan River and “made a promise to a promise to be good at love.” And thus, Second Memory turns to and peers in somewhat strange somewhat not places: a grave that has fallen into the water, a metaphor, a poetic predecessor, and so on. The work is joyous in its acknowledgement of precedence. The work is held together by a brief thread of longevity and where it is pulled into a knot, the recto reveals: “The habitus of a second memory, the intimacy of touch, the recoiling away from a touch unwelcome or a touch that has made itself unwelcome. In love, I think of all this and glimpse my reflection in a knife as I cut garlic.” The various confluences in this work left me in wonder, and with a nostalgia for pieces I have never read.
Yet, I will maintain, Second Memory is most stunning in its ink-stained and smudged voice. An address here, an initial there, or traces I recognize from the writers’ individual works seem to hint at two sides of a correspondence. And it is a correspondence of soft light. One that is both welcoming and longing. But ultimately, the work resists that distinction, in favour of celebrating the fluidity of voice, of the weight of voices of ancestry, poetic precedence and fellow poets in one’s own. Of voice pouring into voice.
Second Memory, published in Canada by baseline press, is out on 15 June 2021, and Karen Schindler was kind enough to send me an ARC.
Ever yours,
ALHS
The Poemgranates Archive 