Beyond the Verse Ancestral Rituals & Encroaching Modernity: Mamang Dai's 'Small Towns and the River'
In this episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, hosts Maiya and Joe explore 'Small Towns and the River' by Mamang Dai, a deeply resonant poem that blends cosmology, animism, and the intimate experiences of life and death in India’s northeastern hill communities.
Together, they unpack how Dai—drawing on her Adi tribal heritage and deep environmental consciousness—uses the imagery of a flowing river to explore permanence, transience, and the cyclical nature of life and grief. The hosts examine the significance of animistic belief systems, the personification of the natural world, and how rituals provide both protection and continuity for communities facing modern encroachment.
From the evocative opening line—“Small towns always remind me of death”—to the river’s symbolic immortality, Maiya and Joe discuss how Dai crafts a vision of death not as an end, but a transformation woven into ancestral and geographic memory. They also analyze how the poem’s structure mimics the flow of water and how it reflects Dai’s subtle anxieties about cultural erosion in a modernizing world.
Download exclusive PDFs on Small Towns and the River, available to Poetry+ members:
Tune in and discover:
- How Dai’s Adi heritage and environmentalism shape the poem’s core message.
- Why the river becomes a metaphor for both grief and ancestral continuity
- How oral tradition and mythology intersect with poetic form.
- What the poem reveals about the tension between rural identity and urban expansion.
- How Dai uses timeless natural symbols to explore mortality, memory, and renewal.
As always, for the ultimate poetry experience, join Poetry+ and explore all things poetry at PoemAnalysis.com.