The Salt of Something New is the debut collection of poems by Dublin-based Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan. The poems explore love and attraction, excitement and disappointment, responding to the city both as homeplace and site of ongoing discoveries and negotiations.
“I think about connections, commitment, islands…” she writes in the poem that give the book its title. “How I feel about home, waiting at the edge of things, / wondering when to enter, when to make / myself comfortable, how long to stay.”
Throughout, there is a remarkable lightness of touch, a precision that reminds us of the poet’s abiding interest in science and nature, the fruits of which further extend the range of this confident and memorable debut.
“The trajectory of cultures crossing and intersecting is striking in this fresh and powerful collection of poems. The voice is electric, its sense of urgency hammered to a gleam of language and rhythm both arresting and moving. Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan offers her readers an existential watermark, one that urges us to consider prayer, prophecy, power and womanhood and how fidelity to a city and new country forms part of an exciting treasury of language, emotion, and the self.”
—Mary O’Donnell“From Border Control to Busáras, Annaghmakerrig to Armagh, The Salt of Something New is a moving mosaic of home. Exultant, tender, real, Narayanan-Mohan is a poet of place and community, a cartographer of the work and intimacy of rooting. Nothing sums up the collection better than the emotional precision of this line break, from a poem about the Irish naturalisation ceremony: ‘There is no republic that can contain me / Like you’.”
—Gustav Parker Hibbett
18.39 above Dublin
Hovering above the coast,
Dublin a shadow beyond the wing of a plane.
We are meandering, stalling, and it feels like
how I feel about home, waiting at the edge of things,
wondering when to enter, when to make
myself comfortable, how long to stay.
From this angle the water is a slab,
currents stretch-marking across its heave
with the oil-slick sheen of spoilt bacon.
Familiar cliffs cast shadows onto the sea.
For a moment the island seems to hover,
until a wind flicks the waves awake
along exposed beaches at low tide
where sand swirls and settles, reminiscent of fortunes
in Turkish coffee cups from another life.
I think about connections, commitments, islands,
what it means to stay, what it would feel like
to fly into an airport on a different coast
taking in a different shoreline,
taking on a different accent, but maybe
ready for the salt of something new.
The Salt of Something New
Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan
Author’s website
Cover artwork: Where the Youghiogheny meets the Glennacally Bridge, oils and vinyl emulsion on linen 110x80cm (2023), by Caitlyn Rooke, by kind permission.
www.caitlynrooke.com
