“Unexpected Turns”: Gail Hosking’s review of Feeding the Ghosts by Rahul Mehta
Feeding the Ghosts
Rahul Mehta
University Press of Kentucky (2024)
The author, Rahul Mehta, known for his award-winning fiction, has written an amazing and beautiful collection of poems. These pages “write and re-write the world” with morning prayers, honesty, hopes, desire, fears and memory. So many of his lines made me pause, made me cry, made me laugh, then made me wish I had written them. I loved following his scenes and unexpected turns, whether meditating on his possible promotion and what he will do if it happens, or when he writes about the ocean with its currents below and above. “Something is always happening you cannot see.”
His poetry takes refuge in the dailiness of life as he speaks of his “small blue notebook,” arranging birthday peonies on his birthday, “a sun-smacked window,” or “winged creatures” outside his window, or his “bad dog trying to be good.” Memories bloom with crepe myrtle reminding him of the deep corral of his mother’s necklace. “Stories are ceremonies,” he insists; “everything finding its way.” Place weaves itself throughout the book as well, from a fire escape in Philadelphia to an ashram in India to his immigrant parents’ sunroom in West Virginia to a summer lawn in upstate New York. His tangible lines go back and forth with the braiding of his past and his understanding of a brown, queer man’s life in Appalachia, India and in universities. He writes of discovering selfhood and love, the natural world, family, friends; all the while teaching us that it’s not the big things we seek, but the dailiness of existence that illuminates what we are grateful for. “…grateful for the bird this brooding bird…one two three, mother father brother—who brooded over me.”
In this canopy of beautiful language and reflections, we feel his loneliness, his gratitude, the fragility of love, and mostly, the freshness of his insight. Mehta has given himself over to the things he cares about, his close listening to humanity’s joys and struggles. “Find the beauty,” becomes his mantra, and after reading this book, it’s become mine. This is a must read!
Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter (U of Iowa Press) and two books of poems Retrieval and Adieu(Main Street Rag Press). MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. Essays and poems have appeared in such places as Waxwing, Post Road, South Dakota Review, and The Healing Muse. Several pieces have been anthologized. Twice “most notable” in Best American Essays. Several Pushcart nominations.