Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps
by Yamini Pathak
Milk and Cake Press
Oct 2025, USD$20, 78 pages, ISBN: 979-8-9884449-9-2
There’s a kind of sweet nostalgia in Yamini Pathak’s poetry, a recovery of lost things. It’s not so much a dwelling on memory as a bringing into focus former events as marvels to be admired. As she writes in “Elegy for the Way Home,” “the day / after tomorrow wheels around to point / at the day before yesterday.” Time is circular, recurring. Currently living in New Jersey, Pathak writes about her native India in ways that are at once wondrous and prosaic, rooted in domesticity but exotic at the same time. Elsewhere, in “On the Trail,” she spells this out: “This is my land, then, / part memory, part dream.”
Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps is constructed as a sort of song, with parts corresponding to the Indian raga. After the Prelude and the poem titled “Pakad,” which is a Hindi word signifying a musical phrase, as well as a verb meaning “hold, catch, capture, cling, preserve, protect,” the collection is divided into sections relating to the raga – “Thaat,” the parent scale, “Alaap,” the invocation, a melodic improvisation that introduces the raga, and “Pakad,” which is the essence of the raga – poems that, indeed, capture and preserve memories, or not even “memories” so much as “melodies.” As she writes in “Hunger,” mourning her lost parent (father? mother?) while preparing a meal and listening to Yo-Yo Ma: “a dirge / using an ancient sound that my bones knew already from some place I couldn’t remember.”
The incantatory poem titled “Pakad” hauntingly concludes:
Our pre-dawn ragas still dark-threaded still
throb with the sweet
wet of morning.
The world Pathak writes about is so enchanting! Take the start of the poem, “Atlas of Lost Places”:
Popat the fortune-telling parrot hops out onto grimy pavement, picks tarot cards for anxious passersby, dines on his petri-dish of green chilies and broken fruit. His clipped wings dream of flight, scarlet-tipped verdant arrows that spear blue skies, of siesta in the guava grove, of orgies succulent with wild mango.
It sounds so magical! Poems involving her mother and father likewise have this sense of capturing lost time, mapping the atlas of lost locations. In “Travel Companion” Pathak dreams of taking a trip up “the long spine of India” with her father. They sample “the curls / of its dialects that make in our mouths, a soup / of diphthongs curried in stained buses and flint-sparked trains.” It’s a lovely, heartwarming dream, her father guiding her “through the Agra Fort // across the Yamuna from the Taj.” And then she wakes up: “cold feet, to a New Jersey winter.”
“In the Museum of Daughter Hungers” is another poem that involves her dad, at a museum in Hyderabad called the Salar Jung museum, where they find an escritoire that once belonged Marie Antoinette. “On a Far Afternoon” is a memory of seeing her father for the last time, in his hospital room.
The Parsee Towers of Silence
stood next door to the hospital. I don’t believe
in signs but actually, I do. My father
was going to die but I didn’t know it.
The last voice my father heard
was mine. The next to last thing I
said to him was,
You’re doing really good, Papa.
Her memories of her mother are no less poignant. “I Have Eaten Under Her Skies,” “Blood Medicine,” “Mirch Masala,” and “Bazaar” are several poems that evoke her mother and her domestic chores; we see the poet clinging to her mother’s saree, watching her prepare food, picking through beans, cooking (“the boiling, puffing, the scream / of the pot-bellied cooker”), shopping in the marketplace with her, the spices they sought and used. In “Mirch Masala” she remembers
On the eve of my wedding
my mother gave me a spice box
she had carried overseas all the way from
India. Much like hers, in stainless steel
six small cylinders redolent
with the colors and smells of home.
The title of the collection comes from “Ode to My Mother’s Mouth”:
Kali, the bone-dissolver,
her tongue flames true
red, her voice hums with lioness blood.
My mother’s mouth: brimsstone,
flour and ghee,
slain chicken and prayer.
My mother’s mouth: a palace
of lamps. In her hall of benevolent
mirrors my reflection is dancing
“Shringar” is a poem about the magic of watching her mother putting on makeup (“When she walks into the bedroom, the walls expand”). “The Skin Finds Its Way Home” starts with the touching reflection, “For years, my mother was the map of the world.” The love she expresses for her parents is profound.
Other memories include school (a biology class in “Unspoken”), her nanny, Ayah, in “In Rough Company,” a memory of a journey to Hampi, a city in the Indian state of Karnataka, along the Tungabhadra River.
“Manifesto for the Widow who wishes to Live” and “Heirloom” are poems about young women who have lost their husbands – Khasma-nu-khaani. Husband-Eater. The rules for such women are complex and restrictive – only wear white; “Your hair shall be shorn to the skin of your skull.” Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps also includes a number of ghazals, including one written for her sons, born in the United States, “Ghazal for the Children Born Far from Home”:
Gather rotis for stray cows, scatter rice for ragged crows
I’ve severed you from old ways, this is my sorrow
Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps includes other poems such as “Ode to My Right Eye That Sees Double After Reading Late,” a reflection on her “lazy eye”, the “black ants that crawled across” the eye chart. “Perimenopause: A Burning Haibun” uses erasure to underscore the bodily changes a middle-aged woman endures. “In My Own Skin” is an amusing poem about the Monday morning work meeting encounter with “Petunia, from Credit Policy,” whose withering gaze and imperious questions are meant to reduce the speaker to a quivering, apologetic mess, but “flames
from my forehead laser forth and raze
her to the ground. She makes a soft pile of ash.
I flick a jasmine bud atop the smoking heap
on my way out.
With a kind of amused resignation at the ultimate futility of actually restoring the past, Pathak writes in the final poem in the collection, “And Just When You Think You’ve Attained the Heart”: “of the labyrinth it doubles back.” The tangled maze of memory “coils and uncoils like a surprising / octopus in a grove of silver birches swaying / hello.” And yet, it’s a compelling journey toward that very heart.
The raga that is Her Mouth A Palace of Lamps sings with a siren’s lure and stays with the reader long after the final poem.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and most recently, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.