Heliotropia, Manahil Bandukwala
Brick Books, 2024
Season of Sunflowers
I love the sunflowers
when they are taller than me
and when they are not. I love
the river on a hot
day, when all grime melts
into water, and even
when the day is not hot,
the river still shuts off
all other voices. I love
the sound of the dictionary
read aloud past midnight,
not hearing any meaning
but catching bluegrass
and verses between the seconds.
I love how precious
seconds are, and thirds, and
fourths, and so on. There
is rarely pleasure of lasting love
in a first. I love
unravelling stitches and unravelling
at the end of a long day
that has been full of love or not.
Each day can hold one
thing to love, like the love of fresh
red sumac or a hug that
lasts, really lasts. The subject
of love is constantly
changing, but look, so is my love.
The second full-length poetry title by Manahil
Bandukwala, a writer and visual artist who currently divides her time between
Ottawa and Mississauga, Ontario, is Heliotropia (Kingston ON: Brick
Books, 2024), a collection shortlisted both for this year’s City of Ottawa Book
Awards and the Archibald Lampman Award. Heliotropia follows on the heels
of a handful of chapbooks, both solo and collaborative, as well as her full-length
debut, MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was itself shortlisted
for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, the same year she was selected as a Writer’s
Trust of Canada Rising Star. “I dig out a hole and find things I once held / so
tight,” she writes, to open the poem “August,” part of the poem-sequence “Seventeen
Months of Distance,” “though nothing stopped their time to leave. / Fur shed
when they moved // into bigger and better lives. We are never ready / to absorb
the emptiness of loss, but must // pause to howl at the chameleon of being.”
Set as a suite of stand-alone poems amid poem-clusters,
Heliotropia is a collection of first-person narrative lyric heart. As her
first full-length collection, MONUMENT, as she offers as part of an interview last fall, began as “a single poem that sought to highlight
obscured Mughal women in history,” a poem that evolved into a manuscript,
having outgrown those initial boundaries, this new collection writes (as the
cover copy provides) “a meditation on love during times of social and political
upheaval. As a sunflower’s growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is
a lover’s growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved.”
In the extended prose-lyric sequence “I over hand over,” as she offers:
I loved him the way I wanted to love the earth. My nose pressed into freshly dug garden soil. Small buds appeared on the rose bush. Last year’s thorns pricked my cheeks. He did not lick the blood clean from my face. I wanted to love him while loving my sisters and mother and laundered sheets and pots of snake plants. Ants looped bangles around my broken wrists. Scar extended from my left pinky to protruding bone [.]
Bandukwala writes “the sound of the dictionary,” crafting an exploratory language while remaining within a structure held to that foundation of meaning. She writes open-hearted lyrics of love and distance, both temporal and physical, and a core to cling to amid chaos; writing how the heart can hold across time and geography, despite climate crisis and political chaos. If one holds or is held tight enough, the poems suggest, it can provide salve, even safety, against anything that comes. “Bougainvillea,” she writes, as part of the cluster-suite “Archive of love in botany,” “paper-thin pink, presses into the paper / on which we pen a hundred hearts // in lieu of promises […].” This particular botanical sextet, six poems underneath the banner-title of “Archive of love in botany”—“Aster and solidago,” “Bougainvillea,” “Dicentra canadensis,” “Helianthus annuus,” “Jasminum” and “Lilium lancifolium”—also provides a curious echo to that other poet of precise abstract, detailed research and scientific engagement with flora and fauna, Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris [see my review of Legris’ latest collection here]. “Jasmine, a scent-guided poem to sieve nostalgia.” begins Bandukwala’s penultimate poem in this series, “Do not ingest, do not approach. Regard this poem / from the other side of the sidewalk. / Some words / appear best under a petal moon.”
Heliotropia is a collection composed, purposely and unapologetically, of first-person love poems, something the “serious writer” has long been told to steer of, whether through creative writing classes or elsewhere (and for good reason, as most contemporary love poems hold a combination of hollow, cringe and smarm; the usual accomplished approach is from the side, not head-on), often set aside, as well, for the sake of the more ironic and postmodern distance. And yet, this impulse is where many writers begin, often in youth, falling into attempts at writing that can’t progress thought beyond that initial feeling, unable to find or reveal the poem, and the language, beneath what the heart only knows. Through Heliotropia, Bandukwala approaches her subject, and her lyric, with an eye on study, working her way through the collection with a balance of exploratory distance and pure feeling, held together through the bonds of craft. “The illiterate man feels / in the dark for words / he did not write. // Outside his house,” Bandukwala writes, as part of “The Splitting,” “some men say / he is a madman, others say he is / a poet // who believes enough words will build a bridge to a life after now / where only beings lighter than air float. // But the illiterate man is neither.”
In her own recent full-length debut, Elegy for Opportunity (Hamilton ON: Buckrider Books/Wolsak and Wynn, 2025) [see my review of such here], Vancouver poet Natalie Lim subtitled her poem “Winter in Ottawa” with the dedication “for the Love Poem Collective / after Manahil Bandukwala,” suggesting the impulse to attend to the “love poem” even more overt, even communal, possibly centred around Bandukwala and this particular project. Or, as “Bougainvillea,” second of the botanical sextet suite, ends:
We stain the page until
it tears.
There are more love poems
to write.
