Manahil Bandukwala (Liam Burke)

Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poems, Heliotropia, shares its name with a unisex perfume by Swedish luxury brand Byredo. Like the scent’s floral note of jasmine, a flower that opens at night, the works in this intimate collection also respond to light – but Bandukwala’s poems (which invoke a number of flowers) respond to an abundance of it.

The opening poem, “Season of Sunflowers,” is childlike, playful, and disarming in its sincerity: “I love the sunflowers when they are taller than me / and when they are not. I love the river on a hot / day, when all the grime melts into the water.” Innocence and experience are not different phases of knowledge where one leads to the next, but are intertwined and renewing instead: “I love how precious seconds are, and thirds, and / fourths, and so on. There is rarely pleasure of lasting love / in a first.”

With subtle but arresting insights, Bandukwala brings light to the quietest intimacies. Drawing inspiration from myriad poets and artists such as Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Canadian darling Phyllis Webb, Richard Siken’s poem “Scheherazade,” and the art of Egon Schiele, Bandukwala speaks of “a love that will come,” even as she references loss and melancholy, as when the speaker notes that their grandparents “are making their home / somewhere I won’t ever enter.”

In “The Splitting,” Bandukwala responds to Iranian American Kaveh Akbar’s “The Miracle,” a poem about the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad. Unfolding over several pages, Bandukwala’s poem narrates the prophet’s harrowing experience through fragments, and with refrains about the prophet’s illiteracy, yet the poem emphasizes the power of words and faith, where “Magic is not real. Magic takes hold.”

“Threshold Ghazal” returns Bandukwala to the lyric; here the speaker stays outside, “hammering the word to the outer brick.” Her definition of the ghazal is freeing, defiant, and joyous: “A ghazal is anything music enough to wall against / forgetting. A song or a line on repeat above the buzz / of another language.” This is a refreshing addition to the canonical understanding of the ghazal in Canada, popularized by the New Brunswick poet John Thompson, whose wondrous, awe-filled, and sad ghazals hold a deep reverence and respect for the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Arabic form. Bandukwala’s “Threshold Ghazal” is the work of a generous writer; it teaches one how to read the poem as it’s being read.

Heliotropia is filled with lovers and beloveds, agape, starlight, and “animal light.” There are also dreams, doorways, and musings on the galaxy. Heliotropia is ultimately a collection that expands in the elusive spaces where word, touch, and light are a palimpsest of magic. Here, saints, sinners, and in-betweeners alike may agree that “even at its most difficult / love is worth loving.”

Bandukwala is a poet whose guide is love.