In the title poem of Suneeta Peres da Costa’s debut poetry collection, The Prodigal, the protagonist wakes to an imprint of tulsi beads marking her cheek where she slept, ‘writing their faint, inscrutable calligraphy’. The poem recalling Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin and Derek Walcott invokes the collection’s landscape of peripatetic and displaced being, traversed by themes of Goan and Indian history, diasporic identity, family and friendship, grief and illness, art and life. The book unravels myths of homecoming and return, belonging and displacement, patrimony and sovereignty; the poems’ speakers feel both at home and also far from home. Best known for her work as a novelist, Peres da Costa expands upon the range of voices in her fiction, conjuring dramatic personae from Indian history and allegories from suburban Sydney, exploring lyric, narrative and essayistic modes. The collection reflects on artworks and objects: miniature Mughal watercolours and photographs of cockatoos; a tamarillo, a panettone. Passionfruit vines are disentangled; a street cobbler repairs the strap of a bag. Marked by its attention to the body, its strengths and infirmities, Peres da Costa explores the experience of suffering through earthly and human ecologies and primordial connections.
