Only Flying

Cassia Hall reviewed the prose poetry collection by Mayuri (Brook Bhagat)

Only Flying
by Brook Bhagat (Mayuri) – brook-bhagat.com
Unsolicited Press, 2021
98 pages
Paperback, eBook and Kindle
ISBN-10: ‎1950730832
ISBN-13: ‎978-1950730834
ASIN: ‎B09DF2WKBY
Available from unsolicitedpress.com and amazon *

I devoured this collection within a day, and only halfway through did I realise that I had been hungry, perhaps even starving, for prose poetry.

The author shows a deft hand at word-painting – rich and lush pictures come to life in a smattering of words chosen with great care and positioned for maximum effect. The imagery is not just beautiful but often original and unexpected.

There’s even humour – Public Poems Built on Public Property is barely a paragraph long and yet is filled with unusual but very apt imagery. It’s a little gem that made me grin from the first sentence and laugh out loud at the very last word.

Goblin King is yet another one-paragraph-long wonder, a tiny sparkling tour-de-force resonating with the author’s sure voice and observant nature.

The Map (a chapter excerpt from a pending novel) is rich with detail, the prose smooth and hypnotic, drawing the reader inexorably into a poet’s vision. I cannot wait to get my hands on this novel.

This collection is an anthology of a poet’s work, showcasing her versatility with different styles, and even a few instances of second-person POV which is not seen very often and rarely used to such great effect, notably in the highly-charged Seven Notes.

Taken as a whole, this collection might be considered an artist’s contemplation of Life in all its aspects. This is what it might be like to notice things unseen and unheard but deeply felt, that most have chosen (consciously or unconsciously) not to see or feel or hear. The author’s genius is the ability to put them into patterns of words that sing with beauty and cadence.

The question being posed might be this: What is the meaning of Life and the purpose of suffering? But perhaps, Life is not to be understood, only experienced. And we must, like the protagonist in The River’s Harp, be brave and open to experience, transmuting the horrors of this life into something mystical, perhaps even divine.

Beauty and ugliness, violence and serenity, joy and despair, the magical and the mundane – these are all part of Life, the author seems to be saying. There’s no escaping any of it. There’s no embracing one without acknowledging the other. Because they are two sides of the same coin, the currency of Life.

Perhaps it is not possible, within our human limitations, to understand it all. All we can do is accept, and with acceptance comes a semblance of wisdom and, ultimately, hopefully, our deliverance.

With the last poem in this collection, the titular Only Flying, the author shows us, in one short paragraph, the experience of personal transcendence – the suffering that breaks us wide open so that the light within us might shine. No-one else knows because things might look the same from the outside and yet we know, because it feels completely different this time round.

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to read this extraordinary prose poetry collection, and I look forward very much to reading Oma, her novel-in-progress. I’m sure it will be balm for my soul.

Mayuri (Brook Bhagat) is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction on paradox, rebellion, transformation, and enlightenment from Unsolicited Press.

Her work has won contests at Loud Coffee Press and A Story in 100 Words, and it has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, The Alien Buddha Goes Pop, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and other journals and anthologies.

Mayuri and her husband Ullas created Blue Planet Journal, which she edits and writes for. She is also a frequent contributor to Osho News.

She holds an MFA from Lindenwood University and is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Pikes Peak State College.

Read her work at brook-bhagat.com, and follow her on social media @BrookBhagat