Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps
Poetry
Milk and Cake Press, 2025
$20.00, 78 pages, ISBN: 979-8-9884449-9-2
Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps is a book about a woman’s search for identity across cultures: her native heritage from India and her current life in New Jersey. When I read it, I felt the lamplight of the title lighting recent decades that have brought an abundance of voices from diverse cultures to listeners who once heard only the limited notes of western white people drowning out the richness of the world. The rising sound of actively inclusive poetry has changed our lives. Of course now, at this moment in history, the expansion of intercultural expression is progress at risk, threatened by federal policies of anti-DEI. The silence on the horizon should frighten us all.
This book’s lyric vision of life for one girl / woman in India, then New Jersey, bends and turns, sinuous in a labyrinth, with vital connections to family members. A natural world of confluent rivers, fortune-telling parrots, mung beans, mangos, and scrub clinging to a hillside holds lives and deaths within its multiplicity. The conjoining of humans and nature unfolds in sensual, earthly, and spiritual poems. Here, worlds of scent, images, and a framework of music come to life in relaxed but vivid language. The details of place and relationships are authentically told in stories that transcend the linear. They flutter between turned pages, coming home to roost in your chest—the place—you know—then take flight with spiritual yearning.
The labyrinth invoked in the beginning poem “Pakad,” meaning the essence of a raga, introduces the book’s circular looping structure. The end section is also titled “Pakad.” In the inner maze, the body of the book sometimes moves with the breezy forward motion of a hiker, then turns and returns in a quest worthy of a true heroine. Surprises suggest the improvisation within a raga.
“Self- Portrait as Suburban Deer” is surprise enough with its title, but then it offers:
“All eyeshine and leaping hearts my herd / muscles bunched, gather / under
the constellation of The Archer // Once, I prayed. Was prey. Surrendered sinew to
become another’s strength. // Now I champ your tulips…”
Another moment of circling is found in the prelude to the book. The speaker sings the raga Durga, “Named for the Mother Goddess who travels the three worlds astride a lion,” at the age of nine. Close to the end of the book, she herself rides a muscled tiger into her American workplace.
The ghazal form often used inherently travels a labyrinth, in her own words:
“Imagine a ghazal the verses threaded into a / labyrinth each
couplet a shifting / tunnel that leads to / the winking jewel at its heart.”
Then, at the end:
“And Just When You Think You’ve attained the heart (title)
of the labyrinth it doubles back / If there is a place to walk toward / this might be
it: / what coils and uncoils like a surprising / octopus in a grove of silver birches
swaying / hello.
As in Jorge Luis Borges’ book Labyrinths,” the solving is elusive. Perhaps the solution would terrify more than being lost. The poet’s native language reveals the puzzle of time, cyclical in the labyrinth:
“Yesterday is the same word used for tomorrow.”
Pathak poses the question:
“In the face of this aftermath of fierce living / what returns us to us?”
Though Pathak speaks lucidly, on firm ground, she does not flinch at the shadowed world of tunnels and weightless cloud travel of the otherworldly.
One of the most affecting poems of the book, and perhaps the closest rendering of the labyrinth as cultural journey and its almost-resolution is “Ghazal for the Children Born Far from Home.” Dedicated to her sons, the poem is a passing-on of the tensions and the light between honoring a heritage and assimilating in a new home. The opening line of the first couplet offers what appears to be mystical and practical advice from the old country:
“Gather rotis for stray cows, scatter rice for ragged crows.”
This is followed by the line,
“I’ve severed you from the old ways, this is my sorrow.”
The details accumulate powerfully, and the refrain “This is my sorrow” returns like a wave that has been pulled offshore, signaling time. The gentle lyric conveyance comes up against the inevitable refrain, perfectly fitting the form of a ghazal. The final couplet offers a ‘solution,’ echoing back through time and into the future:
“I will be your compass, my bones are yours to borrow. / My body your only true country. / This is my sorrow.” Pathak ingeniously uses her body as the signature of the poet traditionally found in the last line of a ghazal.
In the first poem “Pakad,’ the essence of the book’s raga is sounded in themes of cultural shame opposed with joy. Beginning with negative external perceptions that have been internalized, Pathak writes about how her table manners, using hands, are thought to be savage. Then she describes her mother hand-feeding rice grains into the mouths of children, “with love in her fingers.” After despising her own skin color she says, ” The gods remain, toned by dusk.”
“Our pre-dawn ragas still dark-threaded still / throb in the sweet / wet of morning.” Mushaira is a ritual in darkness, where lamps are carried by poets reading to an audience who calls out when moved, “Wah-Wah!” Joy, joy. The author’s first name, Yamini, means night.
Skin is a recurring motif moving through the labyrinth, rendered as ancestral connection, death substance, and as a vehicle for empathy. A young widow is cast out as a “husband-eater,” and Pathak writes,
“To be a guest under your own skin / I know how it feels. “
Skin also rolls rice balls in the palms, and honeys the taste of food. Poems titled “All the Skin We’ve Traveled,” “The Skin Finds its Way Home, ” and “In My Own Skin,” elaborate on the theme. One poem tells us the mother was “map of the world,” but now choosing a home of her own, Pathak finds a good place “Because my skin remembered the future.” This reversal of memory is one more echo in the book’s time signature sense, ancestral memory going forward and back. Toward the end of the book, “In My Own Skin” begins “I wear my goddess skin to work.” This poem gathers ideas of old and new cultures with motifs of skin, animals, the third eye, and magical powers. The speaker owns her history, chooses her own mindset, arrives on a tiger the color of sundown to her “standard-issue gray” workspace. She dresses in glamorous Indian-inspired clothing, all the while mastering her American work environment.
“My hair, cumulonimbus, carries essence of jasmine and Mumbai-monsoon / into
the chill of the air-conditioned room.”
Petunia from Credit Policy tries to reduce the goddess, and, well— read the book to find out what happens!
Spices in the book create atmosphere, are phantasm, anchor, and song, linked to mother and goddesses. Pathak casts a spell of scent and taste with their particulars. Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps should be prescribed as aroma therapy for depression and the like! The wedding gift of a spice box from her mother travels with her to America, and is part valued, passionate connection to her mother, and part guilty reminder that she now mostly does not cook from scratch. An objective correlative of loss. Loss crescendos in poems about the death of her beloved father.
The varied forms used for the poems create a panoply of containers for the buoyant lyricism encountered. We have already talked about ghazals; there are more than a few. In the mix are also a manifesto, a triolet, a rondo, odes, elegies, a burning haibun, and prose poems. The containers are life-giving, not confining. Together they present an artful array, thoughtfully filled. “Perimenopause: A Burning Haibun’s” form is a prose poem followed by two successive erasures, ending as a haiku. The humor of using a hot flash as the subject is perfect.
Erasure is a fitting form for a poem in this book of personal and cultural loss and gain. The speaker has experienced herself as erased in key components of her particular humanity: eating habits, skin, death of a father, change of familiar landscape—flora and fauna, gods and goddesses. The burning haibun “burns” down to embers, an essence, a haiku, Pakad. The visual look, a poem followed by blacked-out lines and words in the second section, and even more dramatically erased, thus black, in the final (third) section is somehow like a labyrinth or maze. The seeker must experience the dark, illuminated by word-lamps as way markers.
When I studied geography in high school, “other” cultures were reduced to stereotypes, showing”exotic” customs as marvels to consume like scenic views on postcards. Nuances of difference and commonality were largely ignored. I wish I could have read Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps to experience something real that was not from my own small world, a gift to illuminate the vastness of the intercultural landscape. It was impossible to smell coriander and cumin in the textbooks as one does in Pathak’s poems. This book is a stunning rendering of one woman’s journey that insists on moving forward in a line before it circles back, forward, and back again, through the disorientations of switching continents. Her presence on the path warms the lonely route of every human’s adventure.
“You’re a stranger in the garden, late bloomer…”