Description
The Salt of Something New is the debut collection of poems by Dublin-based Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan. The poems explore love and attraction, excitement and disappointment, responding to the city both as homeplace and site of ongoing discoveries and negotiations.
“I think about connections, commitment, islands…” she writes in the poem that give the book its title. “How I feel about home, waiting at the edge of things, / wondering when to enter, when to make / myself comfortable, how long to stay.”
Throughout, there is a remarkable lightness of touch, a precision that reminds us of the poet’s abiding interest in science and nature, the fruits of which further extend the range of this confident and memorable debut.
“The trajectory of cultures crossing and intersecting is striking in this fresh and powerful collection of poems. The voice is electric, its sense of urgency hammered to a gleam of language and rhythm both arresting and moving. Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan offers her readers an existential watermark, one that urges us to consider prayer, prophecy, power and womanhood and how fidelity to a city and new country forms part of an exciting treasury of language, emotion, and the self.”
—Mary O’Donnell
“From Border Control to Busáras, Annaghmakerrig to Armagh, The Salt of Something New is a moving mosaic of home. Exultant, tender, real, Narayanan-Mohan is a poet of place and community, a cartographer of the work and intimacy of rooting. Nothing sums up the collection better than the emotional precision of this line break, from a poem about the Irish naturalisation ceremony: ‘There is no republic that can contain me / Like you’.”
—Gustav Parker Hibbett