Moon Child – Rushali Mukherjee – Book Review

Poets are very different from others when we get into the ramifications. Otherwise, they are very similar to common people around us. What makes them different from others is their response to the emotional and rational triggers – how do they react to things they see, feel, hear and experience makes them different from others who simply react. A poet reacts with words and this is what the author of Moon Child, a poetry collection, has done. Rushali Mukherjee is a young poet who has come out with her debut poetry collection with 100 short poems and sketches in equal numbers accompanying the verse.

The poetry collection is essentially an emotive response to the poet’s predicament – whatever she feels and thinks, find a majority of the share in her poetic response. For example, she reacts to very simple thoughts in equally simple ways. Most of the times, it’s about love – feeling of being taken care of, relatives like father, mother, surroundings, memories and aspirations of the future.

There is so much strength
In the softness of your heart 

Couplets (without rhyme) can be met occasionally while you go through this poetry collection and you can only imagine how can someone so young find such depth in poetry… whether Rushali has done it out of emotions or out of deep thinking and after sinking into the depths of philosophical texts – who cares? Readers just need to enjoy poetry and they do!

The part that makes this book, as a whole, much better are the sketches by the poet. Not only a poet, Rushali happens to be an equally talented artist with pencils and she has supplied beautiful, expressive and almost animated sketches that make the poetry even more thoughtful and almost like a picture-story, like the phases of the moon, this collection travels from the first poetry to the 100th. At times, some readers will surely glance at the sketch accompanied by the text and guess the theme of the poem. On many occasions, you will find a young couple, a single girl, a girl with her parents, abstract emotions depicted in sketches.

The beauty of this poetry collection might not be found and traced if we see it by the eyes of a critic. We need to see this collection with the perspective of a simple reader who is eager to read poetry and meet the experiences that are experienced by the poet herself. In this way, Moon Child comes out a very expressive, raw and unaltered collection of simple and straightforward poems unknown to the world of saying something else by writing something else. Though this is what poets mostly do, Rushali has decided to keep it simple and raw – like the Moon – you can interpret it the way you like.

Love
In your universe 
I hope to be the brightest star

Critically, the collection lacks unity. As I indicated earlier, it is not written with a purpose to be written – poetry is the purpose here, itself. Rushali Mukherjee is more a poet of emotions than a poet of the occasion. Though the factual lapses in the form of poetry can be apparently seen, anything goes as poetry once you decide to write… and no one can find fault in it! For example, poems do not begin and do not stop because they lack punctuation marks, a standard practice. Modern poets, however, do not find it essential. So you find in this collection! The poems do not have rhyme, most of the times, and it is not necessary at the same time. So, it’s simple. Readers need to extract their pleasure out of these 100 poems and sketches… the way they like! 🙂

You can get a copy of this collection from Amazon India by clicking the link below:

Buy the poetry collection from Amazon India – click here to buy 

Review by Simran Sharma for Active Reader – Book Blog