Tigress

by Jessica Mookherjee

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 70
Rating:

Synopsis:

Jessica Mookherjee, highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes, presents her second collection of poems, Tigress. Mixing myth, magic and migration, these poems explore the impact of choice upon our lives and concentrate their magnificent, kaleidoscopic imagination on the intricate and often fraught nature of childhood and family, selfhood and womanhood.

Fierce, often funny, always charged and revealing, Mookerjee’s acute attention to detail tracks lives lived between Bengal, Wales and London. In exploring the intense displacement and loss that marks the experience of migration, the poems move into territories of danger and safety, illness and heartbreak, and ultimately into self-discovery; a rich and sensual moonlit menagerie of bears, big cats, wolves, and ‘forest mothers’. At every step, Tigress is wildly inventive, elegant and utterly distinctive.

I quite like Jessica Mookherjee’s Tigress, particularly the title poem — I saved this snippet, for example, which really jumped out for me:

Caged deep inside her chest,
she sedates it every morning and every night
before bed. Around tea-time,
her eyes flick open

as her heart-beat quickens.
[…]

Behind her husband’s back,
she plans an attack.
Until it starts to get dark. Until it’s time
to take her pills.

It helps as well that she knows Wales (I think grew up there?) and mentions places I know, little familiar things, along with the darker and sadder stuff about mental illness and family troubles. I don’t know how much of it is persona and how much is autobiography, but the poems were pretty powerful, and I like Mookherjee’s verse.

I’d definitely read more by her!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)