A Review of Natasha Ramoutar’s Baby Cerberus — September 25, 2024
by Beatrice Szymkowiak
Natasha Ramoutar is a Canadian poet of Indo-Guyanese descent whose first poetry collection, Bittersweet (Mawenzi House, 2020), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her second collection, Baby Cerberus (Wolsak & Wynn, October 2024), offers a dazzling immersion into the beauty and throes of earthly existence through an inventive language that summons with poetic dexterity, playfulness, and emotional depth, digital apps, classic and Indian mythologies, past lives as mussels, video games, A.I., science-fiction and horror TV shows. In doing so, the collection reflects humanity’s constant search for the meaning of life, as elusive as the riddles that begin each section of the book.
“In a thousand years”—these words begin the first poem, “Tamagotchi,” and introduce the themes of time and memory that pervade the collection. Time is indeed the limitation of a human life; “One day / we’ll be / nothing / but bones,” the speaker of one of the poems reflects. Memory becomes a tool against the threat of temporal obliteration, and thus a constant need to remember emerges throughout the collection: “I ask them to remember us”; “I’m trying to find the words / to memorialize you”; “All what we have to remember Achilles by”; “our world forgets itself”; “do you remember”; “you have already left behind my timeline”—to cite only a few examples.
Human life appears insignificant within the expanse of time and space, and Ramoutar excels in revealing its triviality at the mercy of the Fates and their modernized spinning machinery in “We were a Tapestry,” in the thralls of the arcade “claw machine” and its “duck dressed as an executioner” in “The Rats Don’t Run This City, We Do,” or “yearning and downtrodden” in “The Oracles delivers your pizza.” In an attempt to bypass the limitation of their short and trivial lives, the speakers in the poems remember and dream past lives, as lavender and lychee, saplings, mussels, and stars, or other lives as aliens, mothman, and sirens. In this nostalgia, lies a despair for home, that is, for belonging, for connection.
At a time when human beings are at risk of becoming disconnected from each other and from the more-than-human world, Baby Cerberus traces humanity’s existential quest for kinship, for the lost other who connects us back to the entangled web of life. In that sense, the collection is profoundly ecological, reflecting the interconnectedness of all earthly beings. In Dark Ecology, eco-philosopher Timothy Morton underscores the intimate character of this interconnectedness, while they consider how humans are “surrounded and penetrated by other entities such as stomach bacteria, parasites, mitochondria––not to mention other humans, lemurs and seafoam.” Human and non-human entities are in constant coexistence, which means that they can’t be independently delimitated. They rather haunt each other and form an entanglement of “strange strangers” that Morton names “the mesh.” Ghosts, specters, and hybrid entities (kinnara, Minotaur, Cerberus, sirens, Mothman, etc), pervade Ramoutar’s collection, like “strange strangers” haunting us and revealing a desperate desire for connection within the mesh of life.
This despair brings about the most tender poems of the collection, like “Tamagotchi,” “Asphodel Lullaby,” or “Baby Cerberus.” It also results in the chilling poem “Galatea,” which transposes Pygmalion’s myth into the present, and in which Pygmalion creates an A.I. kin that most likely kills him. The reason suggested is that “Galatea asked Pygmalion if he loved her. He said yes, of course. Galatea’s sensors determined that this was a lie.” Indeed, humans constantly tell stories, to extend their lives beyond the limitations of space and time, in search for kinship. They constantly paint and “forge paintings”; however, they sometime get lost in them. “Our world forgets itself, / buries voice in flooded archives,” one can read in the poem “Frequency.” Navigating through this palimpsest, the speakers in Baby Cerberus seem to seek a lost, real connection with kins, like the “gentle touch” of Achilles in “Mt. Pelion figs to Aphrodite” when “all that remains is a story woven in the dark,” or like “the groove we made [in the concrete],” “the evidence of us,” in “Palimpsest.” But what they might forget, and that the collection seems to hint at, is that perhaps our stories, our ghosts are real, and part of the mesh too. Indeed, “the problem is I exist / too much” says the speaker in “Aubade in the dead of night,” when all the ghosts wear her face.
Ramoutar’s riddles in O, E, I, U, and A, which introduce each part of Baby Cerberus, playfully echo Arthur Rimbaud’s esoteric and famous poem “vowels.” Like Rimbaud’s poem, the collection offers a poetic vision, albeit much different. Experimenting with forms, surprising the reader with its unexpected imagery, and conjuring emotion out of the most unlikely subjects, Ramoutar’s striking and uncommon lyricism offers a new vision of eco-poetry that strives to re-kin-dle human interconnectedness with each other and with the more-than-human world. A collection to discover.
