"Sidelights"

Poet, novelist, teacher, scholar, and memoirist Meena Alexander draws from her international experiences growing up in India and the Sudan, being educated in England, and finally moving to the United States. As a result, her work exhibits the influences of a multilingual and multicultural background. Her early poetry, characterized by Aruna Srivastava in Contemporary Women Poets as "a highly Imagistic poetry" which is marked by a tension between "different traditions of poetry, history, myth, and language," falls largely into two periods. The first period encompasses the poems published in India, including The Bird's Bright Ring which explores the consequences of British rule in India, and House of a Thousand Doors, her first book published in the United States. Of the latter book, Alexander told Srivastava that she thinks of it "as a beginning" because of its "sense of newness, of the persistent difficulty of another landscape, another life, becomes in those poems part of a search for a precarious truth." Here, Alexander develops the grandmother figures who serve as bridges between generations, time, and cultures.

The second period begins with The Storm and continues through Night-Scene: The Garden, poems that Alexander told Srivastava "form part of a poetic autobiography." In this second period, Alexander's poetry also becomes more fervently feminist, expanding upon the grandmother images to include mother-daughter relationships as well, and offering her own persona as a voice for the mute and disempowered: "Women of Delhi / You do not see how centuries of dream are flowing from your land / And so I sing knowing poetry to be like bread." Yet Alexander sees herself also as spokesperson for the disassociated and the displaced, trying to connect the fragmentation of the late-twentieth century into a workable whole in which the "bitten self cast back / into its intimate wreckage" will eventually discover itself to be "poised, apart, particular / lovely and rare."

Alexander's memoir Fault Lines drew great critical acclaim when it was published. The author once told CA: "In Fault Lines, I move back and forth between India, the Sudan, and New York City. I have lived in the city since 1979 and it provides...