Reviews, Vol. I, Issue I
In
a poignant, heartwarming and evocative collection of poems, Varsha Singh has
ruffled heart beats and submerged the mind in a deluge of passionate verses—of
lines pure and lucid without the hampered matrix of form or a forced
schema. In the arteries of the Romantics,
like Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, Varsha Singh has constructed a delightful
tapestry of fine prose, marking urges, longings, and convictions. However, in her Neo-romantic approach to
matters of the heart, she embraces something more sublime in the tumultuous
waves of passion shifting to and fro within a soft and dappled light, dancing
to the buoyancy of various human experiences. In short, concise but open ended
lines, the poet paradoxically explores themes marked by continuity regarding
human desires, yearnings for overwhelming aspects of the passionate life. The conceit is unraveled in the potent
figure-of-speech including personifications, similes and metaphors of nature
spawned by the imagination while conjuring up various moods and feelings —as in
“Remembrance,” where an animated memory
creeps like the earthworm crawling inside the heart of the ground.
Mysterious and inward is the way.
Intuition is the voice heard above reason, as the journey into the night
appears sometimes private and nostalgically revealing in one of the poet’s most
illuminating verses, “A Walk to remember
with you.” The imagery of a moonlit
night may suggest a vague knowledge of the path traveled by faith. Here, the
nuances of quiet moonlight set the
mood for sentimental recollections regarding companionship. The
eroded longing for answers appears strikingly impressionable in the poet’s
clever play of words exemplified in the closing lines of “Repressed Desires” where “waste land [appears] dying to regain its
lost Paradise.” Despite the sometimes desolate sublimity, “Sudden glare of Hope” breaks forth in other words posing the
question of growing love despite the harsh terrain of human experiences—“If
rocks can become jewels so why can’t the humans?” When the darkness turns to light, stars
evince their brightness, and as the “My
Mighty Gulmohar” splashes its dashing color across the sky, the poet is
inspired to dream dreams of grandeur.
This urge and eroded longing for
meaningful restorations appear to strike a chord in the poet’s passionate call
for unconditional and universal awareness for a collective state of one love in
the fractured state of human innermost experience along an occasional mystical
or sociopolitical plane. In verses like
“Synonym-less” and “Waiting for The Only Source,” a feeling
of a spiritual union or the simultaneous juxtaposition of immanence and
transcendence describes the Source. While in a verse; “Do Thou Know Thy Nation?”—the poet has drawn our awareness to
matters of patriotism and political concerns toward an all-inclusive society—in
a nudge to go beyond color boundaries, caste systems and perceptions of based
on regionalism. This, more meaningful
state of the union, is likened to the imagery of evergreen or the priceless
value of a state perhaps flawed by preferred internal undercurrents.
“The
Deluge with Varsha” is delightfully refreshing and sensational telling. The
fragrance is soft and dainty especially in the rain as “flowers oozing charm
drop crystals on the ground and in my melted mind… every time you come around,”
said the poet. The pausing silence is
occasionally broken by a “Dribbling…drizzling…[and] splashing around!” Then,
shortly after the trickling rainfall, it “billows me out with a great wave…[to]
make another rainfall,” the poet continued. Besides all, it’s the felt
experience in the open lines most sublime that will transport her readers into
the striking awakening in “The Journey”
where “The curtains of night budged,/The voice of Dawn revealed/I stood gazing
all awake/The journey of darkness to day!”
About the book
Author- Varsha Singh
Deluges: A Collection of Poems.
New Delhi: GNOSIS, 2014.
ISBN 978-93-81030-68-4
Pages: 82, Price: 195.
Reviewed by Paul C Blake,
Independent Thinker/Writer, Georgia
Email: licknis@yahoo.com
Website: www.paulcblake.com
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