Photo: Baard Henriksen
Poet Priya Bains is not red for conflicts and will provide readers and comments that are critical to the family, to communities and to different cultures, the reviewer claims.
I have her last release With the remains of my hands Baines addresses various challenges around power relations:
some say
that over the family rests a curse
a mist that creeps into women’s bodies
so only girl children are born
the fog is white and cold
a foreign hand
The collection is a rich and populated book about migration, rituals, grief, beautification, powerlessness and magic.
A political person
Bains is a graduate of the Academy of Writing in Hordaland and the Writers’ School in Copenhagen.
Transfer oktoberjournal.no she tells about who she is.
– I write poems and am interested in politics, like to drink beer and have recently become a dog person. My sun sign is fish, the moon sign my shooter.
Furthermore, she talks about the seeds of this book project.
– The book contains several themes that I can use much longer than what I have written on this project. But the first actual texts came under a writing aptus, where I wrote ten to twelve pages in and intensively larger, and I could almost immediately say that here was enough material for a book. Although I did not fully trust the feeling when it came.
The poetry debutant himself has called for more systematic diversity thinking in the publishing industry.
– We have not done enough, and need guidelines, she says to Our Country about proposals for study offers that can increase the diversity among authors.
Receives mixed reception
Espen Grønne, reviewer in Dagbladet, emphasizes that Bains’ first collection of poems is uneven.
– At its best, it strikes me right in the diaphragm with powerful and memorable lines and images. At its weakest, it becomes too obvious, and thus loses much of its sting.
A challenge with poetry is to create ideas about pluralism, the reviewer claims.
– Nevertheless, I am left with the feeling that many of these statements become too much stencils. As if the whole thing is really a monologue in which the poem-self just caricatures the others as such «speaks out».