Songs Along The Way Home

Songs Along the Way Home is the sixth book of poems from the versatile writer from Nagaland, Temsula Ao, who has also written books on her own culture and folklore, commentaries on social issues in essays, short fiction, literary criticism, her memoir, and now a novel. But the bulk of her writing since 1988 has been poetry. As she once admitted to an interviewer, she is happiest writing poetry and added that if she is remembered at all, she would like to be remembered as a poet.

The earlier five books of poems are now available in a collected volume called Book of Songs, published by Heritage Publishing House, Dimapur (2013). The novel Aosenla's Story has just been published by Zubaan, New Delhi (2017).

The recurrent tone of the narrative voices in this latest book of poems appears to be markedly more introspective than in the earlier ones. It may be because here is a poet who finds herself at a terminal moment in life, facing that “ordained certainty” for all humanity. However, it is the poet's consistent resistance to that inevitability that endows the “songs” with an urgent energy, although touched by pathos. In spite of the interplay between resignation and acceptance of the “inevitable” in the general ambience of the book, the poet is still defiant and insists till the end that these are certainly not her “last songs”!