Mani Rao’s latest book of poetry, So That You Know, may be strewn with personal pronouns and a conversational tone, title onwards, but with the preface clarifying ‘these days I’m craving privacy even from myself’, the frankness could well be a rearview mirror to make the poet appear closer than she is. A crafting exquisite enough to turn us confidant.
Mani’s workmanship allows only the apt in that factory of words where poets go honing. Poems that come from everywhere, with the titles revealing a non-stop engagement with the real world, with the practical. Tomatoes reply: I am not afraid of death, I am afraid; So Yes But No… Verse that tersely slips into spiritual nooks and crannies, where one marriage is an overcoat and another marriage a haunted house. Mani is nothing and no one but a poet, turning even the mundane into a lyric.
The poet recurs in multiple roles. Now, a daughter who says of her mother: No wonder I am so fearless / All the panic safe with her. Now an exorcist: Ghosts have no ends / no measurements / They scale walls / Collapse / into a lamp. It is perhaps in the asides that the real Mani lives: Maybe the highway robbers will have a special smile for me.
There’s the indrawn breath: each word ensouled, self-aware, mulling the power of pause. What Mani proves with So That You Know is her nimble footwork in the dance of language. Take ‘Kashi Triptych’. Did marrow fizz / Fire laugh / In three hours and a half / this human log / collectible / in a dustpan.
What words do to her and what she does with words is a secret she now seems ready to share. If words are your thing, this is your book.