what is stronger / than the human heart / which shatters over and over / and still lives
Rating: 3/5
Trigger Warnings: rape, sexual abuse, sexual violence, trauma
Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t read the book, this review will contain spoilers so it’s up to you if you continue…
I really sit on the fence when it comes to Rupi Kaur. Her distinctive broken-sentence poetry and simple line art has earned her fame as an Instapoet, and she has now published two collections of poems: milk and honey, and the sun and her flowers. There’s a lot of controversy over her freeverse, as well as her ‘blurring [of] individual and collective trauma in her quest to depict the quintessential South Asian female experience’, and it seems everyone has an opinion - whether devotional love to Kaur’s work, or online mockery of her style. Personally, my opinion has changed a lot between reading her first collection (released in 2014), and reading her second (released October 2017). Despite their release dates, I’ve only read the two collections about a year apart and even in that short time I’ve gone through a whole cycle of emotions concerning them.
I really loved honey and milk when I first read it. It felt as if Kaur had found a way to express what I was feeling concerning love and relationships. Looking over my copy as I write this up, there are small stars in the corners of a lot of pages, a message to myself that this was something I should remember, or learn from, something I identified with. Looking back, I also realise some of my appreciation of this poetry was because of my emotional state at the time; I am embarrassed to look at it now and think that I was feeling those things, but I also think that’s what a lot of Kaur’s poetry says. It expresses the joys of falling in love again and again (page 162 of the sun and her flowers expresses this for me) and honestly? These are poems people can identify with, and I don’t have a problem with that.
I do, however, have a problem with the poems which simply aren’t poems. Some of them are just a sentence - not even a fragmented sentence in which enjambment offers certain emphasis. Take, for example, page 44: ‘your absence is a missing limb’, or page 38: ‘i think my body knew you would not stay’ (both from the sun and her flowers). Even with my loose definition of poetry, I can’t accept statements like this as poetry; they’re a line in poem, a starting place. Kaur’s poetry definitely lacks complexity, and whilst this isn’t a problem in itself, these sentences (and I’m sure I could find many other examples) lack any depth as well. Yeah, breaking up can make you feel like someone’s absence is a missing limb, but that in itself is just a sentence you might say to someone, not an entire poem in itself.
Is my ambivalence coming across yet? Parts of both collections I love and feel empowered by, parts are just cliché and generic. I just skip through portions of the sun and her flowers because I have no feelings about the poems; I believe good poetry should make me pause and think, make me feel something, but sometimes I can read four or five in a row and feel nothing. I like the sun and her flowers slightly more than milk and honey simply because the poems tend to be longer, telling more of a story, but the themes of Kaur’s poetry are consistent: love, separation, trauma, diaspora and immigration, family, sex.
Watching and reading other people’s reviews of the sun and her flowers the division of feelings I feel are clear in the dichotomy of people’s reviews: they can be easily sorted into love and hate. I’m still not sure what I feel, hence the 3/5. Some of the poems I really relate to (see page 66), some I don’t know if I’d label as poetry at all. Genuinely can’t tell you whether I advise reading this collection or not, maybe borrowing it from a library or a friend is your best option to tell the truth. If you do read it, page 198 is brilliant. But it’s also followed shortly after by a poem which simply says ‘I long to be a lily pad’ so I’m not sure I can really praise the collection too much.
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