Poem Reviews : My Soul Time
Welcome to 2021 Poetarrati Poem Reviews.
It has taken a while to get back to the poem reviews. The luxury of time that COVID year 2020 offered is not there anymore. Every business, including mine is not clawing their way back to some sanity. The victim of such ‘getting back to normal’ life is the time in our hands.
I had a book release in my hands. It took more than planned time to reach a point when I can start focusing on my writing for 2021.
Before we dip into this year’s (2021) poem reviews, I would like to share that the ‘Poetarrati Poem Reviews 2020’ is on the anvil, and will be released in April in Kindle and paperback form in Amazon across the world. The book contains 15 reviews of around 25 poems written by 11 inspiring poets from 6 countries.
‘Poem Reviews’ involve lazy prowling on LinkedIn ( that is where I pick my poems), reading the poems, savoring them once; then again; then another time. Then mulling over the multiple layers that the poems peeled in my mind like a juicy orange.
I sit on my perch or lying down awake, staring at the ceiling when everybody have entered slumberland. I prance around like a peacock when I unknot the tangle, or unveil the mystery; I jump in my bath when the proverbial Eureka happens on the next big idea of ‘Poem Reviews’.
There is a saying in Tamil, my mother tongue, ‘Karumbu thinna kooliyaa kudukanum?’ — translated to ‘Do you need to get paid for tasting sugarcane?’.
A sugarcane is licked, peeled, chewed and chomped. It is the ultimate eating challenge. The juice of the sugarcane travels around the tongue, mingling with the saliva and then disappears into the throat and the gut. A poem is no less. The unraveling the meanings of and between the lines, then visualizing the poems in words, lines and meanings, and then in entirety, is a connoisseur’s delight. That is the delightful experience I go through, which I try to share in my limited vocabulary.
Writing a poem review is my soul time, therefore. My soul flies from my body and traverses the words, emotions, situations, places and
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson
The limitations are my visualization and verbiage, while the poems themselves are limitless and can be consumed in myriad ways. So, please be patient with me, in case you read my poem reviews.
I will be back shortly with the first Poem Review of 2021.
~Ashok Subramanian
