Book Excerpts

Witness an Ode to Poetry and Art in Namrita Bachchan’s “A Full Circle”

 

A Full Circle is an evocative ode to the power of poetry, in which art and verse bring each other alive. In this poem, author and artist Namrita Bachchan describes the magic of childhood and what the world looks like through the eyes of her curious, free-spirited five-year-old daughter, as she explores the wonder of reading. Read an excerpt:

I had attempted to make a children’s book once before. The experience of parenthood, however, so deeply shifted my perspective that it wasn’t until I was in the daily presence of a curious and vibrant innocence that I could genuinely begin to navigate their mystifying world—a world to which I had once belonged myself.

I wrote this poem one evening when Noah was around two years old. In fact, I didn’t so much write it as come into it, because the words themselves began to cascade spontaneously in my mind, growing organically in both directions to form verse. All of a sudden, I had something meaningful I could preserve for her, something hymnal for her to carry through the course of her own life as a kind of heirloom, connecting her inner voice to mine. So began the creative process.

The sentiment at the heart of this poem is one that, as a visual artist, I have contemplated often—the closer I look, the further I see—especially whilst engaged in the act of photography, given my eye is instinctively drawn to the small and commonplace over the looming and manifest. Or rather, as is my belief, the small and commonplace which often reveals itself to be the looming and manifest.

The cyclical nature of the poem, itself a metaphor for all life, gives the lines a cadence making them easy to memorize, and calls to mind that evocative medieval term carmen matricale, meaning primitive or maternal song, which takes its root in the Latin word matrix, meaning womb. It is both sweet and surprising that over the past year of picturizing it, I found myself repeating the lines internally in the manner of a personal incantation. It is my hope that Noah, and perhaps even you, will find comfort and courage should you do the same.

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