# August Rituals

- Link: https://writersworkshopindia.com/2022/07/11/august-rituals/
- Published: 2022-07-11T19:25:12+00:00
- Author: shuktara

5/5 - (9 votes)

**Author:** Ritamvara Bhattacharya[⌊A sample cover of the book: olive green coloured sari with gold embossed nameplate and lettering for the title and author's name. The border of the sari lines the right hand margin of the cover.⌉](https://writersworkshopindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/August-Rituals.jpeg)
**
Pages:** 56 **Year of Publication:** 2022 **Price:** Rs 200 **ISBN:** 978-81-956648-
7-0 (9788195664870)

_**About the Author**_
 Ritamvara received the Nissim International Poetry Prize
and the Tagore Poetry Prize in 2020. Her poems have been published in portals like
Muse India, Café Dissensus, The Sunflower Collective and Plato’s Cave. Her debut
chapbook, _In the mirror, our graves_, with writer Ravi Shankar N (2021), received
accolades. She is an avid lover of life, literature and colours.

_**About the Book**_
 In his foreword to the book, Tim Tomlinson writes:

“In these pages of lyrics, haibun, prose poems, and free verse, the same superabundance
of stimulating detail — fragrance, colour, meteorological event — occurs and unfolds
as naturally as flowers lean toward light. In its pages, the landscape is lyric 
and alive, familiar yet strange — “jacaranda trees give off a cellophane effect”,
and trousers overturned on a wooden chair “are theatre to the imagination”. Where
there is fear, it’s “the affectionate fear of pink begonia flowers”. The sky “peels
like an orange” and the sun hangs on an umbilical cord, as though worlds are contained
in other worlds from which other beings peer, and one feels as if one has entered
a vibrant colour-soaked surface of a _pichwai _painting…

The great Canadian songwriter/poet Leonard Cohen once dismissed “Suzanne”, the song
that made him famous, as “mere journalism”. Journalism, perhaps: there was an actual
Suzanne, who lived near a river, who served Chinese tea and oranges, and who wore
vintage clothes. But certainly not mere, for without them, the song would not have
soared into the vast megacosm. _**August Rituals**_ is similarly anchored, and therefore
similarly aloft. You’ll want to travel with it.”

_**Teaser**_

_To My Mother Who Has Forgotten to Write_

Her face draws circles into an unknown hemisphere,

in a cocoon of eternal silence,

she feeds on love and light.

Her eyes open up

as closed windows to the cotton clouds,

her fingers are a pattern of two sparrows

balancing on an overhanging branch,

her hair like waves swings back and forth on the cold marble,

her nape, her navel, her vagina

clap like a frolicking sea —

A monument of untold words

hiccups at her first stroke on the page of a torn notebook,

the afternoon inhales in her.

My mother hums a Ramprasad song —

The trapped moths in the sofa

come back to life.

My mother, a Goddess, a God of everything

that has died —

If I knew

how to write an invocation to the Goddess,

if I knew

how to make the galaxies in her eyes

whisper to her once again,

if I knew

how to bury her spent married life,

if I could tell her

Ma, you are my little girl,

perch on my forehead

and draw a mandala of the seventh heaven.

_**Contents**_
 39 poems