Prageeta Sharma's poems offer the reader an unusually modern take on modernity. Her effective program of whimsy, identity, and loneliness--a singularly modern loneliness, replete with the anxiety of community and the despair of belonging--transforms the simple declarations and observations into the stuff of myth.
Sharma's poems offer an unusually modern take on modernity. Her program of whimsy and loneliness transforms simple declarations into myth.
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."
