Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of Fragrances Unseen by A.H. Mehr

I noticed my breathing before I noticed the quiet.

Not the dramatic kind of silence that announces itself, but the softer one — the kind that slips in when the mind stops reaching for the next thing. I was sitting by the window. Late afternoon light. The book closed without ceremony. And for a few seconds, I didn’t feel the need to move.

That is how Fragrances Unseen stayed with me — not as a volume of poems, but as a lingering presence. Like something you smell after someone has left the room and can’t immediately name.

At first, I resisted it.

Not because the writing was difficult, but because it asked for slowness I hadn’t planned for. These poems don’t want to be skimmed. They don’t reward speed. They wait. And waiting, I realized, has become uncomfortable for me.

The ghazals arrived first, and they carried a familiar ache — not imitation, but resonance. They reminded me of translations I once read late at night, where longing didn’t seek answers, only recognition. Some lines felt like they had been overheard rather than written. Others circled their emotion, refusing to pin it down. I felt the writer searching — not for certainty, but for permission to feel unsure.

There was something exposed about that.

As I moved through the book, my posture changed. I leaned back. I read fewer pages at a time. I began to notice the pauses between pieces — the white space doing as much work as the words. This is a collection that understands restraint. It knows when to stop speaking.

The tanka prose section unsettled me more than I expected. Not because of volume or intensity, but because of proximity. These pieces stand very close to lived experience — especially the kind shaped quietly by expectation, gender, and inheritance. One piece, in particular, made me aware of how casually society intrudes into private lives, how advice can become pressure, how concern can disguise cruelty. I didn’t feel outraged while reading it. I felt tired. And that fatigue felt honest.

The haibun pieces felt like rooms you enter barefoot.

Family, memory, interior worlds — all handled without announcement. No one is explained. No one is judged. The poems simply observe and allow coexistence: the loud and the withdrawn, the seen and the overlooked. I found myself thinking of my own silences at home. The ones I defend. The ones I fail to protect.

What surprised me most was how gently the book speaks about mental health. There is no urgency here. No attempt to resolve pain. The poems acknowledge exhaustion, fragmentation, grief — and then let them be. That felt rare. We are so used to art rushing toward healing that we forget the dignity of staying wounded for a while.

Still, the book did not meet me evenly everywhere.

There were moments where I wanted a line to hold a little longer, to risk staying with an image instead of moving on. A few poems felt like they stepped away just as I was leaning in. I noticed that impatience in myself — and stayed with it. Perhaps that, too, was part of the reading.

Because this collection doesn’t try to impress. It doesn’t perform wisdom. It observes. It listens. It trusts the reader to return — to reread, to sit again, to find new meanings in familiar lines. Some poems unfolded more clearly the second time. Others remained opaque, and I let them.

By the end, I wasn’t thinking about forms — ghazal, tanka prose, haibun. I was thinking about attention. About how rarely we grant it fully. About how much of life passes unregistered because we are rushing toward clarity.

This book doesn’t offer clarity.

It offers something quieter.

A permission to pause.

A recognition of unresolved feeling.

A reminder that not everything unseen needs to be explained.

Even now, when I think I’ve put the book back where it belongs, I’m aware of something faint in the air — like a scent you can’t trace, only acknowledge — and I realize I’m still reading it, in a way, long after the page has ended.

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