For readers unacquainted with the publishing phenomenon of Indian-Canadian poet Rupi Kaur, here’s a recap: her debut book of poetry, Milk and Honey, was first self-published in 2014 before being picked up a year later by a trade publisher. It ended up selling over six million copies globally and sat on The New York Times bestseller list for nearly four years.
Yes, the statistics are impressive, but the number of units moved does not necessarily equate to the quality of the work within.
Sure, it sold a gazillion copies and ended up even being made into a film, but remember the abysmal writing in the Fifty Shades of Grey series? Being a best-selling popular writer means just that – literary merit is often an irrelevant metric with which to measure the author’s art.
Which brings us to this thick, handsomely-produced 10th anniversary hardback edition of Milk and Honey, which includes an introduction by Kaur, as well as photos and hand-written diary excerpts. Her line drawings also accompany some of the poems.
Contemporary poetry is often accused of being pretentious and inaccessible, curdled in its own self-importance and lofty language that sometimes even includes Latinate and other foreign forms to prop up its high literary credentials. There’s certainly a case to be made against poetry that is so snootily difficult to parse that the average layperson without a degree in critical theory is denied access to its hallowed grounds. But what if the pendulum sharply swings the other way? What of its corollary opposite? For this is the work proffered by Kaur.
Milk and Honey is poetry lite; it’s aphoristic poetry for the Instagram generation: short, platitudinous, confessional snippets that are written for those of small attention spans, who live for positive aspirational quotes they can chew on with their breakfast of yoghurt and muesli washed down with a green smoothie. To crow that hers is “the poetic voice of a generation” is hardly a compliment if that means, at least to this reader, that the “voice” is insubstantial, lacking any grit in its honeyed sweetness. In lowercase, unpunctuated lines, Kaur strains for profundity but often falls short and heads into triteness: “you’ve touched me/without even/touching me” and “losing you/was the beginning/of myself”.
Her work is a mix of self-help tropes, navel-gazing and relationship hopes and ashes. There is no gravitas here, no poetic play with words. Sure, the themes that Kaur writes about – selfhood, patriarchy, abuse, rejection, love and sex among them – are perennially important topics, but her treatment of them is shallow and lightweight. Her words provide bursts of recognition, but they do not interrogate; they skim the surface, but fail to move beyond. Yes, to her credit she does give voice to the suffering of women and collective trauma, but her poetry is so flippant there’s an illusion of depth when none exists.
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I’d even go so far as to argue whether these truncated maxims are even poetry – they are pops of epiphanies and can be read and wholly digested in the same time it takes to scroll past an Instagram post.
The book is littered with disposable truisms such as: “we are all born/so beautiful/the greatest tragedy is/being convinced we are not”, “I was music/but you had your ears cut off” and “you must/want to spend/the rest of your life/with yourself first”.
Now let us all go and face the brave new world.
There are far better poets than Kaur – both contemporary and historic – that deserve her readership and sales.
Milk and Honey: 10th anniversary collector’s edition, Rupi Kaur
Publisher: Hardie Grant
ISBN: 9781524892876
Format: Hardback
Pages: 296
Release date: 1 October 2024
RRP: $40
