Something Beautiful Travels Far (Poems) by Shaista Tayabali. Published in 2018 by the author, 14, Hauxton Road, Little Shelford, Cambridge, CB22 5HJ; email: shaistatayabali@gmail.com Pp: 75. Price: UK £ 7.99; US $ 10.50.
Something Beautiful Travels Far is a collection of [which author Shaista Tayabali (pictured) terms] "travelling poems.” In the title poem, Something Beautiful Travels Far, she ponders how far a beautiful cup of bone china with blue flowers from Bengal and the shimmering golden watch which once adorned her great-great-grandmother’s skin have travelled. In a similar fashion, have her beautiful poems travelled: they are set in India, Bruges, Bali, Japan, Cambridge and also in the hospital wards, as unfortunately, Tayabali has been suffering from lupus (a disease that affects the nervous system, joints and skin) since she was 18.
The poems in a section of the collection entitled "Just another case of girl, interrupted” deal with this "peculiar, demanding and life altering illness,” the treatment and the hospital wards. The imagery is violent and extremely vivid, often as cruel as the illness. In Exuberance, her fingers and toes "flush hot and cold/ and transform/ into purple flowers.” Lupus and possibly also the pain and the suffering cause her face to become a "transient thing,/ breaking up and taking shape…” However, the picture which emerges from the poems in this section is not of a person who has accepted her fate but who fights against the illness. She challenges lupus to take her exuberant soul, if it dared. In the Blood of Trees, she uses the metaphor and imagery of trees as the title suggests. However, it is not a tree of strength but she compares her body to a fallen tree where a hole is cut "3 needles thick” and her neck to a "pale birch” in which the doctors search for the jugular to drive in their cannula.
.jpg)
There is a strong feeling in her poems about the need to take advantage of the moment and to live life to the fullest. In a poem The Year of Yes, (for Victoria) she regrets the fact that she turned down an invitation for a walk and said "Not today, … /Perhaps, maybe, tomorrow.” She wishes she had said yes and tells her friend in no uncertain terms, "Order me to dress.”
There is a constant tension between the flesh or reality and the spirit resulting in an urge to fly being a dominant motif. Carpe diem, she seems to be telling us and grasp the beauty of the moment, it won’t last long. In a poem After the Rain, her mother Perveen (née Nadirshaw) draws her attention to a blackbird bathing in a puddle after a shower. But by the time she can respond, the bird has taken flight and the beauty of the moment has gone forever.
Once again in Tattered Wings, she advises you to examine closely not the tattered wings and the thin skin of the butterfly but to visualize it in flight: "It commands the skies,
All white, bright,/ Dancing light.”
Similarly in Nirbhaya (for Jyoti) she seems to shun the present, "for I was never born/ and I can never die.” She believes: "I am wings/ I am flight/ and this body/ will surely die.”
Though born in Bombay, Tayabali now lives in Cambridge, England. Her website is www.lupusinflight.com. We gather she is working on her fist novel which should be very promising and which we await with anticipation.