Tanuja Mehrotra Wakefield

Undersong Tanuja Mehrotra Wakefield

In UNDERSONG, Tanuja Mehrotra Wakefield makes the bold claim that "a lyric is always pulsing in the vein, a kind of undersong." Indeed, Wakefield's poems are intensely sonic and musical; they attempt to unearth the strain of music that hides beneath our daily encounters with the world. In these highly crafted poems, she takes up forms (think sestina, ghazal, sonnet) and reshapes them into vehicles that tell a story and transport us to other places. Not only does she explore the Indian immigrant narrative of her parents, she also mines her personal experience as someone wandering, never quite at home. After reading these poems, one begins to sense that, for this poet, maybe home is inside the poem.