The exquisite detailing of love is found repeatedly in Pretti Vangani’s indelible collection of poetry ‘Fifty Mothers’ by River River Books. With searingly poignant lines like: “We are a ministry of less.” Vangani’s poetry repeatedly venerates love and recalls loss in a mixture of precious remembering and bittersweet sorrow. Not purely elegy, but evidencing the accessible tokens of life we can all relate to. In the poem ‘Camera Heaven’ this is viscerally depicted:

“Towards the end all she said

was “God.” I was God, soup was God. If you

were there, you would also be God”

Concluding with the idea of a photo of the poets deceased mother, “out of the dark room, / developed on glossy paper.” Here lies a layering of meanings (loss, reproduction, illusion, delusion, dying, rebirth?) so cleverly blended, you wonder about the elusiveness of what existing means, how the dead remain, or the living are not alive. It’s both metaphorical and slightly surrealist; Are we all waiting in a dark room for developing? Or the other way around? Yes, this is a deliberate, not faulty translation, the poet wants us to question the fragile absurdity between life and death:

“Three buildings away from where Mummy died, I’d smooched, sucked, unzipped, unhooked, licked and laughed in an abandoned stairwell that seemed at the time forever under construction.” (Take My Hand).

When illustrating one’s own loss, a feat few achieve, there’s a liminal stitching of meanings within meanings. In the eponymous poem ‘Fifty Mothers,’ Vangani writes: “when your original mother dies, likeness dies and you end / up with fifty mothers.” I understood the allusion; When young (she was only 21 when she lost her mother) we search for lost-figures in the fog of adulthood and totems. It doesn’t change as we age and pretending surrogates are sufficient is a lie we tell ourselves for tepid comfort. Just as in the poem ‘We Regret The Interruption’:

“We all missed deaths. I’m reminded I landed three hours after

my mother closed her eyes.”

Less anger than unvarnished grief, the duality of (living) whilst (others are dying) the cruel touch of distance and not knowing (someone is terminal) resolves by the last poem in the collection, ‘What This Elegy Wants’ where Vangani states it plainly:

“if my mother were to see me, which I’m certain

she can, as I rummage through the squalor of grief—

through a portal where cream horns are unlimited”

She can’t bring her back to life, or not have lost those years without her, so reconciliation is the only (poor) option. Even so, the bulk of this collection centers on the hot rage of a young woman possessing only “skin memories” and the irony, in the poem ‘Raising Mothers’ of:

“The pill also a mother, dissolving

my aches invisible as the grace I trace in the blanks

between my friend’s fingers”

Vangani does a masterful job of filling her book with mothers in all senses of the word. In the poem ‘The Cremation I Wasn’t Allowed To Attend,’ Vangani is comfortable in her intentionality as a poet, using titles to punch meaning: “Penetration—my first stage of grief. / Bombay sweat soured under my bulk- / purchase thongs.” Combining growing up (and sex) with grieving in such an artful way, I can’t think of when it was done so acutely, whilst never losing sight of (the lost mother) in a contrasting curtsey of grief and will to live. In ‘Light Is A Moving Line’, a sublime poem of the paradoxes of loss and a need to do more than endure, she writes:

“This self is of the world. It has

no time or stamina for wrestling with what ceased.

This self sees yet unsees the deceased wife.

The other half, not exact, imprecise as the moon is

most of the time, it lounges in the involuntary

outcries of what we choose to remember.”

Ultimately, even as we rent the aches in our chests, there is redemption here and the artful language and redolent landscapes are multifaceted in their refrain to not be destroyed. From the beginning, the metaphor of pain in knots with the line: “That woman could unfasten any knot.” The lost mother whose acute absence is grieved over in multiple ways, from not having home cooked food, to feeling humor fall flat without her presence. The gentling language of absence is done so well, even if you have made it this far without loss, you will find yourself understanding it.

“For your own happiness, don’t keep photos of your mother around. Not even one. When will you start behaving like your feet are on this ground? What had happened on this ground was that my own mother died of breast cancer,” (Fifty Mothers).