2 out of 4 stars
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The poetry collection Walking in Blind by Kaviru Gayathri Samarawickrama can be summed up by one word, bold. The author presents a collection that shamelessly expresses the heavy themes of loss, unrequited love, emotional distance, and infidelity in relationships. She discusses unsavory relationships with the authenticity of a new age Sylvia Plath as her poetry is assuredly raw and confessional in nature. Her boldness is featured through the frankness of her work and the goal of her collection.
Kaviru Gayathri Samarawickrama begins her collections with a brief note addressing the audience. She strives to state her purpose for writing these emotional poems as she explains that “I am not ashamed of my feelings. . . . I have learnt that, my words healed someone's wounds. It was a ray of hope, motivation for them” (Samarawickrama 2). This statement is at once inspiring and perhaps a little immature. She seems driven to defend the nature of her poetry and a confident poet would merely present the work unabashedly.
The structure of her collection is customary to the genre. The collection lacks a table of contents, but her poems are divided into three sections entitled “X Marks the Heart,” “Crossing Broken Bridges,” and “Through the Looking Glass.” As a reader, I supposed that the poems in “X Marks the Heart” would logically be about identifying the issues within the relationships that failed; according to that logical, the next two sections would be an outlet for the speaker to find a way to heal and respond to the problems. These works are all governed by intense emotion, so her work does not seem to grow from each other. It was disappointing to note that this means that the problems found in the relationships are not resolved; the speaker is unable to better herself from the woe that stemmed from the relationship. In fact, the speaker seems to become more and more pathetic throughout the poems. This is clearly featured in the poem “A Broken Heart” when the speaker blames another person for “Weight that I have gained because you said / I’m pretty to you in any size. / Roots in my hair damaged because you said / highlights was the latest trend (Samarawickrama 39). The speaker is blaming her partner for decisions she made about her physical appearance. I craved for the speaker to continue and add that she broke away from conventional fads in style or accepted her appearance. Perhaps in a following poetry collection, healing can occur.
I would give Walking in Blind a score of 2 out of 4 stars. Kaviru Gayathri Samarawickrama has poetic merit and she created novel and impressive metaphors and similes. For example, the poem “Museums” compares her former lover to a museum in which his past self is the exhibit. This allows the speaker to express vulnerable feelings of lingering attraction and pain as she notes “but I know that your past inside the museum; / antiques and gold, they tempt me” (Samarawickrama 7). This simile was striking and genuine. She may not be the most impressive wordsmith, but her sheer talent emerges in blank verse and her rawness is my favorite part. Although she has much talent, I think that she has not quite reached her potential yet.
I find her work to still be quite immature. In fact, she unwittingly marred the professionality of her work with the last page or the final note to the reader. She ends her poetry collection with a page that looks like a sickeningly fraudulent letter. Not surprisingly, this was my least favorite part about the collection. The font tries to mimic cursive handwriting and she states “I am that small girl with a small mind. The immature and the hyper one” (Samarawickrama 160). I think she is trying to establish a humble voice, but no writer should ever suggest that he or she has a small mind. The entire set up of the page was a mistake and it may have cost her a star in my review.
In addition to this, she also informs the reader that she is 22. She is talented at 22, but her subjects are cliche and trite to youths. I think she needs to write about more topics, so that the collection is not only about relationships and failed romance. I would like to see more dimensions from her and a stronger speaker. I could not stand the speakers who blamed others for their choices. Samarawickrama may need time to develop her poetry, so that her work is consistently impressive.
While I was reading the collection, i noticed very few errors. These mistakes were extremely minor and did not obstruct the meaning of the poems, but I will note a few of them. One error was found in the poem “Mind Reader.” The speaker states “. . . or why people cant read some sentences” (42). The word cant is not a contraction in this line; it should be spelled like this “can’t.” Truly, only small spelling errors were in the work.
I would recommend this collection to anyone who has gone through a terrible break up. It may serve as a form of catharsis since Samarawickrama’s work is mostly about the consequences of unhappy relationships.
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Walking In Blind: A Collection of Poetry
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Sounds like a bout of wallowing in heartache, though, so I guess you need to be in the right (or perhaps wrong!) frame of mind to really enjoy it.
