Heliotropia

Manahil Bandukwala
Poetry
Brick Books, 2024
99 pages
ISBN: 9781771316347
$23.95
Reviewed by Tara Wohlleben

Heliotropia is Manahil Bandukwala’s second book of poetry, exploring love, distance, and home across five sections. While heliotropism describes how plants move in relation to the sun, Bandukwala explores how we move in relation to love.

In the preface to the book, the poem “Season of Sunflowers” introduces the importance of patience: “how precious seconds are, and thirds, and//fourths, and so on. There is rarely lasting love/in a first.”

The first section covers “Seventeen Months of Distance” with one poem per month, each with an epigraph related to love, longing, or distance. Here we live in “This universe where fear collides/with the little shield of love. Where love/is semi-dormant but/stirring/awake, steady” and distance is no obstacle, as love protects even while it seems to be at rest.

The second section takes us into the past as the Prophet Muhammad escapes from Makkah as the last night passes “where words/are swords to the one where/words become wards” and moves through “people/who have left houses behind too, making homes somewhere//I won’t ever enter.”

The focus is on surrender in the third section. In “I over hand over” Bandukwala breaks down the word surrender into the title words, which echo throughout.  The poem concludes: “I have so much to give. Yellow flowers in August. Clay mug carved with a village. Money plant twined around banister. You do not need to take anything. I hand all over.”

There’s another kind of surrender in “Jet Lag” as the speaker surrenders to the unspoken care of their partner: After their nap “my suitcase is empty;/…/There’s/nothing left to clean/so I come back/to bed and kiss you.”

The fourth section is a single poem called “Space Opera” and pulls quotes from Jaegwon Kim’s “Lonely Souls: Causality and Substance Dualism.” Bandukwala also references the formation of galaxies as “a protogalaxy is a cloud of gas forming into a galaxy or stars/or the slow collapse of dark matter//love is a protogalaxy¹/…/¹I kiss you softly before the slow collapse.” We’re brought home again as “we swing across the stretched fabric of time/& wherever we land becomes home.”

The fifth and final section considers time and the future. “In these hours, love/does not have to be thought” and there is the echo of the earlier semi-dormant love as “We were asleep and now we/are not. We were in love, and we are in love again.”

Bandukwala’s poetry doesn’t stick to a single format, instead shifting and adapting to what it needs to say. The structure lends itself to pauses and sitting with the words and lines as they’re spaced out on the page. Some poems feel like conversations, some like notes left to oneself, but all invite the reader to think in the spaces left on the page.

The Notes section offers translations, citations, and explanations of the media that Bandukwala has drawn from, making sure the reader has details that inform the work. The book’s cover radiates warmth and the starbursts that open each section remind the reader the sun is still shining.

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa. She is the author of MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award. She was selected as a Writer’s Trust Rising Star in 2023. In 2024, Bandukwala was a finalist for the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction for “The Shopkeeper’s Remedy.”