The Flowering Word Tree

Ranjani Neriya celebrates the natural world for its own sake, and also as a cosmic framework for the events that make up or disrupt our lives. The poems gathered together to form her beautiful collection, The Flowering Word Tree, are sumptuous in their wealth of sensory detail, alive with the names and auras of plants, flowers, herbs, and birds. Neriya's poems float and glide through space, evoking the tropical ethos of Mangalore, on India's south-western coast, where she was born and raised, as well as the glorious cycle of the seasons that plays out in the American Midwest, where she has lived for many years. Diasporic and firmly committed to her multiple homelands, she transits between memory and epiphany, reminding us that "to dream is to remember the forgotten." In such a life, the landscapes of the heart are both proximate and far away, and converge in the act of writing, which, for Neriya, is a pensive and prayerful act. When she writes that "all distance comes back/ in search of the lamp we lit/ by the russet seat near the lotus pond," we stand in the presence of deep horizons of ritual and dedication, the space of the present expanded mysteriously to embrace the experience of many generations. The finely tuned rhythms of her poetry resonate with the rhythms of an earth now vandalised by human greed yet resilient and resurgent. Ranjani Neriya's poems affirm the poet's art as that of the patient and attentive gardener, acting in accord with the patterns of frost and thaw, withering and bloom, as she nurtures the exuberance of the tree of language.

Ranjit Hoskote, Author, The Atlas of Lost Beliefs