Sreedevi Nair is a Malayalam poetess, who writes not only poems but also short stories, novels etc; the following is a collection of poems originally written in Malayalam which subsequently translated into English- now translated here into Tamil . So if there is any discrepancy found from the Malayalam original, the responsibility lies with the English version , since the writer does not know Malayalam.
Mrs.Sreedevi Nair uses so wide a canvass for her poems, hence trying to write a few pages about our perception of her poems is so difficult a task to try.So I confine myself to writing about a few of her poems as a basis and I feel it is like the first rung of the ladder of understanding the entire gamut of her sweep over almost all activities of inanimate and animate world in her writing. Words speak different language in her writings and able to bring the ambiance of pronounced silence. Again her words bring a new mirror to our face , showing the self awareness and analysis of human existence. She adds more meanings and to the situations and places which normally appear to be meaningless to us; like in her 'Qarrelsome Kitchen Vessels' in kitchen we see only vessels depending on the utility , whereas when she sees , vessels talking about film,cooking, music and even dressing...............Silence of the kitchen vessels is an affair of heart- breaking to her........... she is able to have a communion with the sorrow of the vessels and says................ ' keeping their face shining, By draining their own tears'. An ordinary Sculpture comes to life , gains more life than humans, and able to show the human frailties, in the poem 'Sculpture" , she in her own way castigates the sculptor for his possessiveness over the statue and makes the fact visible that possessiveness is a destructive process where both possessor and the possessed are lost in this process. Again in the poem we are able to see the power of sex involved in any creation though the 'created one ' does not know this. In a general sweep of her brush , how she paints the presence of soul in both animate and inanimate objects............ leading us to believe the common soul of which we are parts. 'Sea for Sale' is another poem bringing out the woman's mind on to the paper. What people normally think is contradicted by the poet by her saying , the woman in house is partial and the whole woman can not be contained in the house; she is uncontainable and incomprehensible like the sea since sea contains all wealth and in one's lifetime , one can not comprehend ..... the incomprehensible phenomenon .......... called woman. when we open a folder in our personal computer we may see a picture which we stored earlier, but the poet sees a bird comes through her window to the computer and sees a replica of the bird , that had been captured when the bird the previous day came and pecked at the food grains.............. and flew away laughing loudly!!!!! .......... and poet writes , she does not know the reason why the bird laughed.......... in that she effortlessly stresses the point that every moment is freshly taking birth and no point in being stuck with the past thereby demarcating the time as past , present and future........... and we can imagine the scenario behind the lines. Here is a poetess whose lines you can enjoy and imagine by reading the meanings both said and unsaid between the lines. Enjoy reading the poems of Sreedevi Nair.
"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. "
T.S.Eliot
Following are the translations from Malayalam through English .
The following link takes you to the link where the Poet was introduced on an online Magazine.
