On a hartal day a few years ago, Reshma LR wrote a poem on strikes, her first in many years. She used to write as a student of class 7, but had stopped soon after. Inspired by the poetry written by her mother Lalimol and her aunt Sheelamol, Reshma wrote again, during her degree days. Now, a postgraduate student of English Literature in Adoor, Kerala, Reshma got her first recognition – an entry in the India Book of Records for the maximum number of alliterations in a poem.
“It began as a fun experiment. I used to try writing poems with anagrams. Then I tried alliterations with a few letters of the alphabet. It ended up as a 78-line poem using all of the 26 letters, from A to Z,” Reshma says.
The poem is, of course, titled Alliterates. The following is her stanza with the letter R.
Refined rose am I,
Reborn as a rosary of
Rebellion from the
River of realism.
And this para, that is with W:
Wonder am I, a
Withering woman with
Wooden dreams
Wrecked by the wrath of wrinkles.
This poem is about motivation and how poems are composed, says the author. Reshma says she finds strange subjects to write about – like the thoughts of mythological characters one has not heard about. “Like goddess Sita, or Alexander the Great, or Niobe and Jocasta from Greek mythology. I also write about the process of poetic compositions,” she says.
Reshma has made a compilation of her poems into a book, which is getting released on April 22, Thursday. Titled Unstrung Notes, it is available online on Amazon.
Before that, she had published poetry in The Criterion, an English journal. Reshma has always written in English though both her early inspirations – her mother and her aunt – wrote in Malayalam. “My aunt has published three poetry books in Malayalam and my mother writes in magazines. She used to bring me abridged versions of classics when I was a child and this got me passionate about reading at an early age,” Reshma says.
Her mother was also a school teacher who taught Hindi, while her father is into farming. Her younger brother plays a part in her poetry too. “He is the one who began a blog for me to write poetry,” she says.