A Straight Pendulam

The poems translated for this volume reveal Shahnaz Munni's poetic milieu, her sensibility and the view she takes of the life and living around her. Her poetry reads interestingly fresh and is informed by a graceful poise that she is able to sustain all through. She hardly ever loses her composed stance even when it comes to describing the upheaval that puts her familiar world upside down. The imagery she makes use of speaks of the forte of her poetry. Her themes are built around everyday experience that takes on significant forms that are at times surreal, magic real and often absolutely absurd and yet they make sense for the truth she tries to get through to her readers. Her love poems hardly exude any raw emotions and since she uses a different persona in each poem, the ‘I’ is not easily definable as the poet herself. She evinces in her poetry both modern and postmodern traits, though her world is overly postmodern. She consciously avoids the extremes of both worlds which endows her with a metamodern sensibility. The 'pendulum' mentioned in the title poem of this volume is symbolic of her poetic self. Like the pendulum she chooses to oscillate avoiding an extreme stance and that is what makes her poems so refreshingly significant.