Speak, Memory: Can Poetry Preserve A Life?

I don’t know when writing poetry became a way of holding on to things that might otherwise disappear. One memory that often returns is from my childhood in Jabalpur, during a power cut. I was eight. My mother lit a candle in our small rented home where I grew up, and the sudden shift from darkness to a small circle of light stayed with me long after the light returned. That moment, I think, shaped how I later came to understand memory as something partial, fragile and dependent on words for its afterlife.

The poems in my collection,  All That’s Left Behind (Simon & Schuster), move across different phases of my life—childhood in small-town Madhya Pradesh, later years marked by travel, and periods of emotional and geographic displacement. I grew up in Jabalpur in central India, a place still largely absent from the dominant imagination of Anglophone poetry, and the poems carry that world in them in specific sensory details like wet earth after rain, the smell of mogra, a Bajaj scooter turning into a lane, and a sitaphal tree in a backyard during the monsoon.

In one poem, the river swells inside the chest until it reaches the throat. Grief arrives not once but in waves. In another, nostalgia evaporates even as the body continues to carry the excess of monsoon memory—alley after alley, the candle’s flicker still bridging a decade. Other poems dwell in transit spaces where intimacy is shaped by movement, interruption and departure. Across the collection, the poems attempt to hold what places and people can no longer keep intact—and to make that holding legible beyond the places that made it.

What feels meaningful to me is that poets such as Bhanu Kapil, Arundhathi Subramaniam and Daljit Nagra did not read the work as regional or peripheral, but as literature attentive to form, desire, displacement and language. Kapil finds in the poems a world where “forest, face and name are absorbed in succession”, where “nights or occasions convene themselves with immense tenderness”, and where “impossible compressions accrue until they, too, begin to speak”. Elsewhere, the language of old law surfaces, “Whoever voluntarily / has intercourse / with any man / for life”, turning indictment into an elegy for love that survived in silence. Subramaniam reads in the work a voice still willing to sing of desire, one capable of “ripping skies open” and remaking the self through intensity of feeling. Nagra says that the collection imagines “the mythic, the political and the personal with a relish for language”, its compact forms “modeling a determination to endure”.

The closing sections of the book turn toward aftermath rather than resolution—absence, memory and the continued presence of what is no longer physically there. The poems do not attempt restoration, but linger instead on how loss is carried and articulated. “Dead flowers / absences that fill rooms / love like breath on a mirror / too quickly smudged to hold its shape”—these become the material of the final poems. They do not offer recovery. They make the texture of loss speakable.

I do not have a definitive answer to whether poetry can preserve a life. What the writing offers instead is a way of staying close to specific moments for a little longer—the river, a passing encounter, a childhood scene, without claiming to fix them permanently. The emphasis is on proximity rather than preservation.

The monsoon continues to return each year. The Narmada continues to flow through the city. And the poems, in that sense, have become small, stubborn vessels for what would otherwise slip away entirely.

(Aditya Tiwari is the author of All That’s Left Behind, a poetry collection which delves into memory, grief, identity and place.)