The Opening Question

Prageeta Sharma’s poems exhibit a narrative insistence and a drive to witness pursuits and obstacles in thematic terms: myth and/or the mundane. The speaker dwells, rather unhappily but always hopefully, in an inner world of fearfulness and an outer world of destruction. Yet this perceived despair takes another turn: the poems find their bliss by imbuing the landscape with a textual symbolism, by decoding everything, from imaginary urban landscapes to chronological histories. Nothing gets past the narrator of these poems; all decoding fulfills her sense of prophecy. Of Bliss to Fill, Sharma’s first book, critic Christine Hume had this to say: The book is as much a meditation on the inevitability of imitation and duplication as a demonstration of delight in its small variations. Sharma rhymes and chimes her way through as if each word were a homophonic translation for the next. An ebullient cadence and devilish diction, teetering on the verge of apprehension, pinball through Bliss. Each word feels its way to the next with a fierce fidelity to the sound and sense of language, and in doing so, poem after poem create strange, searching linguistic landscapes.