SOURCE: Kurup, P. K. J. “Revolt.” In Contemporary Indian Poetry in English, pp. 144-63. New Delhi, India: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Kurup offers a thematic and stylistic examination of the poems in The Descendants.

In the second volume of the poet—The Descendants—the same existential despair of the self emerging from the failure to establish an eternal bond and to realise the meaning of existence is intoned, this time with heightened intensity. The difference here is that most of the poems in this volume provide evidence to her painstaking efforts for a fuller encounter with life. In a bid to receive the myriad impressions of life the self is exposed to life and to death which is the other part of life itself. This is one reason why critics like Devindra Kohli find these poems as death conscious and even death possessed. But if...