ISBN: 978-1-915108-28-9
Publication Date: 26 June 2025
98 Pages
from Viscera: Blood Fragments
III.
You learnt the word eviscerate when you first glanced
human viscera. A man lay dying but not all dead outside
the hospital, Christ bled on the wall, as the man’s arm
convulsed and swung off the stretcher like a rope over a well.
A head wet with blood bisected by nature’s knife.
Brains and bilge flowered on,
a body near-docked by the shore for Charon.
Contretemps at a construction site, a phrase you saw
at the back of your mind—“haemic disaster”, words
sloped downward, dripped crimson and doctors
with their all seeing eye, medical and weary
seemed to have only one way to see what I saw—
“we were told such cases mattered little”,
they had declared couples dead before, lodged them
as injuries by suicide in reports, when it was well
and clear that a village had conspired to hang
the two off a tree—these strange fruits of the east.
Ours are not the shores of Ilium, love is not
free. Turning to us now, the doctor asked
“Do you send an entire dwelling to the gallows
for the death of two?” by which he meant
a good citizen can’t always be good, or true.
So let the grief of a devastated conscience
turn them into Christ,
so let them suffer, so let them die.
*
Medha Singh’s poems deal with grief, absence, love and loss, often engaging with the concrete and small as a funnel for the larger ideas that govern us. Her work relies on image and music more than movement and action, which is really a way of thinking of identity and place as rooted in one’s experience of language – the sounds inside the voice of your mother, the words on pages of school books – all have a way of affecting the internal music of our everyday experience. Quotidian and intimate, Afterbody speaks of what survives us: it is the body’s secret laid bare. Singh’s style is unashamedly modernist and blends deft wit with seriousness of purpose. She builds a primordial homeland from the shifting tectonic plates of memory and the spaces we occupy.
“Gorgeous, poignant, beautifully evocative and strange, masterfully subtle, yet poetically exhilarating… Afterbody will properly announce Singh as one of the most notable emerging poets in Scotland.” —Alan Gillis
“Medha’s work is honed and stylistically assured and informed by the wide range of her reading across literature, cultural theory and philosophy. And yet, her poetry is never mannered and always, as Henri Cole says – as all good poetry must be – ‘dipped in the oil of human feeling’. Afterbody is stark, spiky, discursive, as Medha never allows grief in her poems to become an end in itself and instead triangulates grief as a battleground and elegy as a ruined field for self-interrogation and reckoning with the dead, and more than a site to simply erect a memorial.” —Rohan Chhetri
