Black Arts & Culture Feature:
Reviewed by Dustin Pickering
My City is a Murder of Crows
Poems
by Nikita Parik
Hawakal Publishers
July 2022, 100 pages, ISBN-13: 978-9391431426
“The body is a record of the mind” ~ C. H. Sisson, “In a Dark Wood”
Language is a vitalist creation: it is generated by human emotion and need, and finds its way back from itself through signs and binaries. Nikita Parik, in My City is a Murder of Crows, showcases her store of knowledge about language both as poet and linguist. Language may seem as easy as breathing; in fact, the process for a natural speaker is similar to respiration. In “Sandwich” Parik evokes difficulties faced by a non-native speaker of English. The poem reminds us that we often take such a process, and many other things, for granted. However, she delves deeper into this question by engaging with philosophical subtleties. Language is given the incisive treatment as Parik describes consonants and vowels in the speaker’s mouth, finally describing how the consonants are bound together like bread in a sandwich. However, the deeper principle is that although dark moments are inbound to our existence, we will overcome difficulties such as Covid collectively. This volume records the poet’s experience of Covid through poetry. Several poems resonate with the theme of renewal and rejuvenation, and the underlying text tends to unveil complex metaphors. These techniques invite readers into a state of flux in the present.
Throughout the collection, the nature of binaries is presented as essential to the creative process. In “Cauchemar” Parik writes, “the fluttering veil between / a world / that is and one that isn’t.” This shows that the perception of time differentiates two moments. “This Mouth is an Ocean” further elaborates on this principle by presenting “two open jaws”, assumed to be the narrator’s in the dentist chair. The poem ends with this piece of wisdom, “…all of existence is / a gasping for air.” These perceptions are then questioned by the narrator in the elegy “The Spaces We Don’t Occupy” when Parik writes, “tell me what becomes of spaces / that were, that used to be, and now / just aren’t”. This expresses depth of grief, collectively and individually. Parik answers her own questions in “Static” as she pens,
“All thens have become a non-entity as time thieves around the body of my isolated space, snatching away feverish hours from the threads of memory.”
Our mortal nature is defined by its singleness and our mortality is time’s crutch. “Now is the envy of all the dead,” Parik writes in “Vibrato” defending the hope of living in the moment and what it offers.
Perhaps the most perplexing poem in the collection is “Circles”. Editor Timothy Green is quoted concerning the poem, “But what made me keep coming back was the mystery of what the ‘single word’ might be.” The poem ends with a “single word” stirring “on the lonely page.” I also wonder what the word might be, but I feel that the nature of the experience in the poem is it’s most crucial aspect. The poem describes skies splitting to “birth a language”, reflecting that being alive in each moment is a creative process steeped in linguistic complexities. Life is poetic expression to the poet.
As a reader, the narrative structure and content remind me of Dante’s Inferno. The city is metaphorically presented as a body in four parts, as Dante’s vision is written in 33 cantos minus its Prologue (Purgatorio and Paradiso are 33 cantos each, so Inferno’s Prologue is a deviation from the standard)—the same number of vertebrae in the spine, also suggesting the human body. Parik presents the body as metaphorical, and the city too is an analogy for the harsh reality of her Covid experience . However, the ‘body’ is also a process of speaking something into existence and respecting its independence from the speaker. The ‘city’ is a harrowing tale like Inferno itself, filled with death, pain, and hopelessness. The poet must have drawn the imagery of this vision from Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. “Unreal City” is a poem with a similar moral standing as Eliot’s long poem (in fact, the title phrase is from Eliot who lifted it from Baudelaire). It feels as if the collection is a long poem in itself, yet still a vision of hope. For Parik, people no longer appear to be themselves in the Unreal City because our reality is muddied with the horrors we face collectively.
The author discusses the metaphorical nature of the structure in her introduction while allowing readers space for their perspectives. Eliot’s poem offers a similar consolation to the reader who is termed “hypocrite reader, brother mine” after Baudelaire— a reader is naturally critical, making of the work what her own attention intuits. It is clever that Eliot teases his reader for misunderstanding authorial intention by invoking this relationship of writer and reader. Parik, however, leaves her readers to peruse possible meanings. Parik’s penetrating vision is not only for art’s sake. These confessional poems are consolations as well.
The most lucid moment of this reader’s experience comes during “Flow”. This poem is playful with its complex analogies. For instance, language becomes “incendiary explosions” of fire, and fire then becomes water. The poem is a linguistics crash course turned prophetic images of carnage. The phrase “tongues of fire” could be interpreted as referencing prophecies from Christ’s apostles.
My City is a Murder of Crows is an experience of empathy with the linguist author’s illness as well as an exploration of language. Although the collective experience of Covid is inferred, Parik’s presentation is individual. The narrator’s experiences are embedded within the mystery and paradoxes of hope. This collection is thought-provoking, and readers may find much to absorb.
About the reviewer: Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press, publisher of the award nominated literary and arts journal Harbinger Asylum and is the author of Salt and Sorrow (Chitrangi Publishers, Kolkata, India), an exploration of Christian humanism in verse. He published A Matter of Degrees (Hawakal Publishers, Kolkata, India), a book on Platonism applied to aesthetics. He self-published The Daunting Ephemeral and The Future of Poetry is NOW: Bones Picking at Death’s Howl. His collection Knows No End (Hawakal Publishers) was briefly an Amazon bestseller. He published Frenetic/No Contest (Alien Buddha Press, USA), a book of ekphrastic poetry based on the art of Red Focks. He inspired the series “spurious conversations” published by Alien Buddha Press that included tribute writings to Charles Manson, Dolores O’Riordan, George Carlin, Stephen Hawkins, Muhammad Ali, and others. His collection The Alderman: spurious conversations with Jim Morrison was published by Alien Buddha Press. He is a critic, reviewer, essayist, visual artist, and a former contributor to Huffington Post.
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