Ganorkar’s poetry can be read as poetry of ambiguity, subtlety, and paradox. Her poems straddle the urban-rural divide. They are not strident, yet are filled with rage. They are not nihilistic, yet are full of despair. There is a strongly passionate undercurrent even in her most quietly resigned poem, ‘Evening’, in which the poet uses her usual strategy of asking questions—‘Do your eyes brim with tears, I wonder?/That sea, those colours, the sky—/Do they suddenly burden you?’ (12)—in a quiet tone. The reader cannot tell what is coming next, which creates poetic tension. This is maintained as the questions continue: ‘Do you struggle against memories/That threaten to weigh you down/And drown you?/This has happened to me’ (12). But instead of working up to a melodramatic climax, the poet now distances herself, and watches her own grief and nostalgic sorrow with a self-reflexive irony which makes her ‘unbearable to [her]self.’ The last two lines, therefore, come as a surprise, successfully driving home the discomfort of the feeling through their wry understatement, while maintaining tight control over the structure till the very end: ‘This evening, at least this sky, these colours, this sea—/Bear them for me.’ (13).
Even at the most poignant moments, the poet watches herself, and how the world sees her, from a distance. As discussed above, many poems are imbued with irony and a self-reflexivity so that they stop short of being melodramatic. Ganorkar’s is a self-analytical, rather than a solipsistic, voice. This is seen very clearly in the poem ‘By the Window’:
As I stand by the window and plait my hair loosened the night before, my eyes suddenly fill with tears. Nilgiri trees stand before me. They are calm, and won’t even flutter a tiny leaf in sympathy. The tears keep welling. Regret, because I threw my stale life to the crows, or sorrow, because I cannot start anew? The trees don’t move, the tears won’t stop. Are you standing behind me? I don’t see you in the mirror. (42)
Similarly, the title of her poetry collection, Vyatheeth, has connotations of both ‘Spent’ and ‘Wasted.’ The poems are about wasted time, wasted years, spent emotions, and a wasted and spent life which still has rare moments of beauty and meaning. They can be seen as a ‘slice in the journey from birth to death, from rebirth to multiple deaths’ (Dahake, "Vyatheeth", 154). Time is an overriding concern for Ganorkar, as is space. She is always aware that there is never enough time, or conversely, that there is too much time. Similarly, some poems express the poet’s emotional claustrophobia and need for freedom, whereas others talk of the loneliness of alienation. Ganorkar’s position is that loneliness is inevitable, and that one must endure it from milestone to milestone in various journeys one undertakes. We see this clearly in ‘Journey’:
Splitting the horizon higher and higher
The saagwan trees carefully cradle their golden tops
And are briskly left behind
… New trees, vines, mountaintops, new lakes...
Shyly folding on themselves,
Lotuses smile slightly and welcome you,
Bow, take their places and are left behind.
… Stars wink and fill only the sky.
Milestones fall by the way
With a monotonous regularity, hiding
Themselves in the cupped hands of darkness. (1-2)
It is bearable not to know where one is going, but the important thing is to keep travelling. Relationships may be formed during the journey, security and love can be liberating in the short term, but ultimately these things cannot provide answers. It is the journey—the search itself—that matters. While this concept does not seem new or different now, the position she takes is unconventional, even radical, for a woman subjected to the orthodox constructs of a woman’s place in the family and society typical of middle-class Maharashtra in the 1960s (Dahake, "Badallele", 38).