Irregularly Irregular: Further reflections on life, living, and relationships for a reflective audience

In this new collection of 260 poems created over 13 years, Cariappa Annaiah continues his reflections on life, living, and relationships as he explores body and mind. Excerpts from the Introduction: The focus of my poetry is relationships-personal, professional, and social. Why? Personal and professional happiness depends on the state of health of my relationship with myself, and then with others. The poems are hyper-local. By counting from one and improving my ability to manage myself emotionally and physically, and then influencing others around me, I can make change one individual at a time, starting with myself. I keep my bar low! From my perspective, the only way to initiate long-term change is to work locally and walk the talk. Why Irregularly Irregular? Two reasons: - Other than reflecting reality, my poetry and art cannot be typecast.- Reality is unpredictable. Unlike fantasy, which is a captive of the mind and thusly malleable, ductile, and predictable since we are in charge, reality is our captor; we are at its mercy; it shapes us like putty and grudgingly yields to our hopes and aspirations. And, why the warning for a reflective audience?Again, reflecting reality, and different from my previous collections, these poems explore all nooks and crannies of the mind and body. From my perspective, refusing to identify and address elephants in the room and denying that sex is a physiological urge is the root of a lot of personal and social ills.

About the Author :
Cariappa Annaiah is a self-taught, eclectic poet and artist, and mentor based in Greater New Orleans. A physician by training and an anatomic pathologist by specialization, he worked as a scientist in India for eight years and in Massachusetts for 22 years before relocating south ten years ago. He holds the earned designation of Copley artist at the Copley Society of Art in Boston, the oldest nonprofit art association in America. He is a member of The New England Poetry Club, founded by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, and Conrad Aiken in 1915. A published poet and award-winning artist, his artwork is in private collections in the USA and abroad.View his unique artwork at www.cariappa.net.

Review :
In making the choice of addressing 'a reflective audience, ' Annaiah has perhaps achieved the challenging goal of making his readers reflective. Reflection to me means sitting back to contemplate; to look inward while not losing sight of what is outside; it also means gazing directly at your own reflection--and not just in a mirror but more so in the retina of the inward looking eye. The poet tells us in the Introduction that Reality, unlike Fantasy is unpredictable. We do not know what Life will throw at us. He prefers to interrogate Reality. He summons focus and clarity into every word, every phrase by confronting them with an unflinching gaze. He makes it look easy, but it is not easy. Many poems pose a teaser that questions my own congealed opinions. The poems will perhaps prompt every reader to work on self-indulgent thoughts and opinions and pare them down to their essence. In some of his poems I felt that rare thrill of discovering something lost . . . as in the very moving poem on being ninety-nine . . . . . . There are poems that evoke sadness, others joy and hope, or tickling good humor. Teen Daymare is goofy and classy at the same time. There is a clear line of difference between the short and long poems in the collection. The short poems are the distilled essence of thoughts and they work. The longer poems showcase Annaiah's ability to hold the narrative to the end. The best of them sparkle. My way of reading this collection would be to read not more than three or four poems in a day and let reflection take up the remaining hours. That will be money and time well spent. Kavery Nambisan, Surgeon and Novelist (excerpt of review on Amazon.com, India)