The Quiet Art of Catching a Moment

By Neena Singh

There is something wonderfully appropriate about the title Suddenly the Moon. A moon that appears suddenly is not really new; it has been there all along. What changes is the moment of noticing. Much the same can be said of the poems in Anirudh Acharya’s first collection. They do not so much construct a poetic world as pause before the world that is already there and invite us to look again.

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Acharya, a mathematician by training and a visual artist, has been reading and writing haiku and short poetry for many years. In his preface, he deliberately avoids prescribing what a haiku should be. Instead, he calls the poems in this collection “haiku-like.” He speaks of moments that arrive when he has “stopped trying,” leaving him with the sense that he has not created something but “caught” something.

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That idea of catching rather than creating becomes central to reading this collection.

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The poems were written over a year and arranged chronologically, moving through Chennai’s seasons: Summer, Waiting for Rain, Cloud Season and Harvest, before the cycle begins again. The arrangement gives the book a quiet circularity, while Chennai itself becomes almost another character—its ocean, heat, monsoon, terraces, temples, apartment buildings, fishing villages, street dogs and everyday human bustle continually enter the poems.

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At their best, Acharya’s poems have the gift of making the familiar momentarily more alive.

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Apartments under construction

all day long prospective buyers—

pigeons too look around

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The humour is gentle, but there is also a lovely shift here. The pigeons become prospective buyers, sharing our habit of inspecting new spaces. An ordinary urban scene acquires another dimension simply through a change of perspective.

Elsewhere, a small domestic detail carries an entire history:

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On your fingertips

long after dinner lovingly made

the smell of garlic

 

The dinner is over, but its presence remains through scent. The poem trusts the reader to supply what is absent. This restraint is one of the collection’s strengths.

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The natural world is everywhere, but these are not simply nature poems. Cats, crows, egrets, sparrows, snails, flowers, clouds and the sea repeatedly intersect with human experience. A lone egret flies west, leaving “empty sky”; a kitten paws at a flower garland; street dogs seem to ask, “Who are you?”; a snail responds to a raindrop by withdrawing into its shell.

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There is also a quiet preoccupation with impermanence. The collection repeatedly brings us to things that are transient or changing: a childhood home for sale, a mother’s ageing body, funeral flowers, a hearse, an old illness, clothes left on a line, a shop that closes permanently, and memories that survive in objects.

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One particularly affecting poem says:

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Now aged enough to

have what was once my mother’s

aching lower back

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The poem does not explain ageing or grief. The recognition is enough. The son’s body has quietly entered the territory once occupied by his mother. Time becomes visible through the body.

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The moon, meanwhile, travels throughout the collection like a recurring companion. It appears over the ocean, behind trees, above an old home, reflected in memory and conversation. Sometimes it is playful; sometimes intimate; sometimes almost elegiac. In one poem, the poet finds himself speaking to it:

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Much to say to you

not in front of the others—

my eyes tell the moon

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Elsewhere, the moon becomes almost indistinguishable from human feeling:

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There, behind your back

caught between our sentences…

freshly risen moon

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These moments reveal why the title works so well. The moon is not merely an image repeated for aesthetic effect. It becomes a quiet thread connecting solitude, intimacy, memory and wonder.

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Acharya’s visual-art sensibility is evident in many of the poems. He often presents a scene almost as a painter might place a few brushstrokes on a page. His own description of the poems as “simple, quick brushstrokes” is apt. There is little attempt to over-explain. The reader is asked to complete the picture.

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This approach does mean that the poems vary in intensity. Some achieve a particularly satisfying meeting of image and insight, where the final phrase opens the poem rather than closes it. Others remain closer to observation or depend more heavily on personification. But perhaps this unevenness is inevitable in a collection whose governing principle is receptivity rather than construction. Acharya is recording what catches his attention across a year, rather than assembling a carefully controlled sequence of formally identical poems.

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For readers coming to the book specifically as a collection of haiku, the author’s qualification—“haiku-like”—is important. These poems do not announce themselves as exercises in formal Japanese poetics. Rather, they occupy the fertile territory around haiku: brief observation, seasonal awareness, juxtaposition, sensory detail, silence and the sudden enlargement of an ordinary moment. The freedom from formal expectation allows Acharya to move naturally between the intimate and the urban, the humorous and the elegiac, the concrete and the contemplative.

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Perhaps the most appealing quality of Suddenly the Moon is its invitation to slow down. A milk basket left untouched. A clothesline retaining the day’s warmth. A fan turning after workers have left. A streetlight humming on an empty road. A leaf insisting on its own reality. These are things most of us might pass without seeing. Acharya’s poems ask us to pause long enough for them to become visible.

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That may ultimately be the quiet achievement of this collection: it reminds us that poetry need not always be found in extraordinary events. Sometimes it waits in the ordinary world, unnoticed until the precise instant when we look up.

And then, suddenly, the moon.

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Suddenly the moon—

out over the vast ocean,

rain clouds drifting by