Category: Poetry
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
All the Answers I Shall Ever Get, Tanya Mendonsa’s second collection of poems, split into two sections, is an exploration and a meditation on two eternal themes: love and friendship and the power of the past.
In these poems are to be found passionate longing and profound loss, but this is no ordinary homage to those most celebrated of human feelings. Bodies and souls mingle here, sometimes in gentle ways, but not always. Everyday boundaries – between reality and fantasy, the self and the other, the sensual and the sinister – are erased. The ordinary becomes extraordinary.
When the poet walks down memory lane, she does not always stick to the straight and narrow. The lay of the land seems familiar, but look closely, and the cracks are there. These poems are inspired by individuals who have been part of the poet’s life, some of them fleetingly.
Mendonsa’s directness and simplicity is, by turns, intimate, terrifying, uplifting and, ultimately, liberating. These poems open our eyes to a world seen anew with a lyricism that never ceases to astonish and delight.
The author: Tanya Mendonsa