Kunjana Parashar, They Gather Around Me, The Animals (NFSPS Press, 2025) 88 pp. £13.99 Pb. ISBN: 979-8-9929766-0-1
This debut poetry collection begins with a dedication like no other—non-human, ecocentric, spanning species, substances, phenomena and processes, Parashar’s deceptively humble lexicon brings immediate reverence to members and mechanisms of an ecosystem sometimes evoking twenty-nine images within fourteen lines. The iconic flora and fauna of the Western Ghats make a swift appearance. In Parashar’s world, there is a singular observer, the reader, a collective conscience and a world rich with nature (Dedication, 11).
‘I’ll tell you how I spend my time’, Parashar declares. The poem undergoes a post-human existential search for meaning while evoking perceptions via colour, silence, smell, transforming into a tactile physical search: ‘I dig my hands into the dark sleep of moss’. Unlike anthropocentric philosophical rumination which leaves the readership hanging with no clear decisions, Parashar declares affirmative action ‘Yes. These are the signs, I’ve been looking for’.
‘Prayer’ (12), the second poem in the series is an elevated Romantic take inclusive of nature and excluding the idea where nature is a spiritual sanctuary, separate from the human experience.
In ‘Wait’ (13), Parashar is the prophet providing an ecological balm to the wounded human heart, urging to seek solace with the universal truth of regeneration. From the formation of mesic soils to mating koels to Mexican salamanders regrowing their feet. Modern science attests to nature helping humans heal through submersing in nature such as the Japanese method Shinrin Yoku, forest bathing, grounding (establishing physical contact and returning to earth from a state of anxiety or stress), entrenching in blue spaces et cetera. Parashar recommends a separation here: wait. Look at the elements, the birds, the animals. Learn.
What makes Parashar’s poems compelling is their attention to human tendencies—questioning, quitting, buckling under the weight of the human condition, such as the poem ‘I’d like to shun this world’ and lines like ‘hunched in pain and crying over an errand, a boy or a broken heel’, yet this despair is quickly met with ecological faith, the reciprocal lives of the yucca moth and plant affirm the poet of the existence of a God, who ensures evident survival with the perpetual act of pollination and persistence which in turn reaffirms the wandering (or) wounded mind.
Some poems are prescriptions such as ‘Go to your safe place’ (40), ‘Before you go any further’ (59), ‘Telling the Bees’ (72). These self-aware poems function as guided meditations, offering what we often seek from poetry, a shift in perspective, an encounter with the truth and ultimately a sense of direction and calm.
‘You can call me, anuran’ in ‘Amphibian’ (44) brings Moby Dick’s iconic opening line, ‘Call me Ishmael’ to mind, whose central theme is human vs nature and the limits of human knowledge is replicated in her poetic voice through anuran. The poem ends with a freezing statement, ‘Before the lust of your colonization: came mine’. ‘The Creature’ (23), akin to Mary Shelley’s Creature in Frankenstein, is a testament to humanity’s hubris.
Once the wilderness world is established, then comes the curious disruption of ‘What I planted under the hydrangeas’ (18), a clear tonal shift from the ode-like poems, where the existence of animals is central and celebrated, and nature becomes a backdrop of a suspenseful something done by a human.
This confessional poem is followed by a confrontational one, ‘The Great Yawn’ (19), the two physically facing one another, conscious and creative editorial choices which brings a coherence and a systems thinking-like approach but in a poetic landscape. On one side ecological harm, biodiversity collapse and climate change, the other is marked by denial, greed and human ignorance. These poems interweave these parallel truths, presenting forked actions which allude to the universal truth and the popular environmental slogan ‘we only have one earth’.
Climate Fresk is a gamified approach developed by French Engineer and Climate Activist, Cedric Ringenbach, which translates the complex interdependencies of the climate system into a collaborative visual exercise. The game relays the message of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. Participants are given pieces of the fresco and relying on collective intelligence, the task is to understand and create a mural or fresco of interactions in the world of climate and ecosystem services, human actions and resulting consequences.
Parashar’s collection operates similarly, the reader is handed fragments and must assemble meaning through attention and inference. Here comes the curious case of ‘Poem with No [ ] in It’ (32), ‘Poem with No Plants in It’ (29), ‘Poem with No Birdsong in It’ (26), ‘Poem with an Absence of Snakes’ (27), ‘Poem with No Dogs in It’ (25).
These poems operate as negative archives, catalogues of disappearances, where absence becomes evidence. Where did they go? What happened to them? Why did it happen? Who is responsible? The reader is implicated, tasked with reading the evidence, making decisions and piecing them together to arrive at the bigger picture, an ecological truth, much like assembling the Climate Fresk. The following verses read like pieces of Parashar’s personal fresco:
In ‘Poem with Dead Birds in It’, (21), words form a fleet in the sky, except they are phantom, for the birds are dead, the sky is empty.
‘…we found empty jowls, rotten teeth, piles of bare ribs’(‘Poem with No Dogs in It’, 25)
‘Where was once sap, once chloroplast, once sugar, once moist, now is only xeric soil’ (‘Poem with No Plants in It’, 29)
What makes this collection brilliant is that animals are not only objects of beauty but also of entertainment—the zoological spectacle. Except the zoo is now a museum, a bizarre collection of leftovers of animals and birds, ‘Today on display: a gharial’s snout, an axolotl’s tail, a yellownape’s feather, a rhino’s hide’ (‘In the Zoo’, 22). While the fun and games lasted a while, a slow panic arises when the audience both in the poem and outside grapple with the reality of missing animals. This treatment of extinction in the macabre silence of fallen animals is a sobering wake up call to the world.
Parashar presents a bouquet of poetic forms, prose poems, a burning haibun, a pantoum, concrete poems. While the poems carry a resounding universal voice, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the distinguishing Indian quality of poems. Select examples include ‘what are you, an environmentalist? or a love letter to mumbai’s intertidal zone’ (15), ‘Makkar Speaks’ (55) and ‘shilonda’ (69).
The book begins, continues and ends with strong ecocentric poetry, all the while tugging at a major constituent of the human experience. Here, we sleep, along with ‘All the spaces of sleep’ (77), the concluding poem, which can be interpreted for its literal call for rest, stillness in nature: no organism evades rest during and after life. The duality of life is dynamism and dormancy. Sleep becomes a shared ecological state, one with species and structures, like an intentional, well-demonstrated ecosystem.
They Gather Around Me, The Animals is undoubtedly a remarkable and pioneering contribution to South Asian ecopoetry in the twenty-first century. Parashar’s animals do not merely gather, but true to their nature, they endure, migrate and take refuge in one’s mind, insisting on reckoning with a world in flux. Long after the first reading, they remain, these animals, around you.
Nithya Maheswari Chidam, Poet, Chennai
