A bird's eye view to our existence

“Coming home has stronger arrival.

It’s got an underlying warmth.

An unsaid responsibility.

Satisfaction of an awkward power.

A resistance of your own chair.

It’s a madness of your jungle.

It’s the inner realm of quiescing and peace.”

Gurmeet Singh’s poems in “Reflections of a mind” have that sense of longing and endearment, that whispers into your ears the words it wants to convey. Even though this book attempts to capture the fleeting fancies and wild reveries of the mind and heart, never do the poems lose its quality of having a universal approach to every concept. The poems pierce directly to the topic it revolves around, avoiding any annoying deviations. As a result, each and every poem stands starkly different from one another—and it stays true to its title. 

The poems come about as fresh and new, and I didn’t find any referential tone to most of them. The poems have a very allegorical shade to them, and they kind of blend in and out of various issues, and tries to put forward the poet’s experience of them. The ‘me’ or ‘I’ is perhaps not the poet himself, it is the projection of the minds of the readers. Some segments of the poems have the capacity to touch each reader at different levels, giving a feeling of pluralism and a scope to verify that multiple lines of thought might culminate at the same larger truth. The genre of the book can be summed up as ‘modern poetry’ and the language isn’t very ornate. Rather, it is the simple and free-flowing words of modern English that coat the verses with honesty and fearlessness. The poems do not have any rhyming parameters, thereby they are essentially ‘free verse’ in form and feel. 

One of the most important attributes of the book, according to me, was the unconventional parts of life that the poet chooses to write upon. It's not ‘old wine in a new bottle’, and the expressions of love and realizations are very original and genuine. Once I was reading the poems, I was often not able to relate to many thoughts that were getting pondered upon, but even then, parts of me could always resonate with the feelings that I was getting immersed in. This gives the poems a very individualistic touch, although the author manages to write from a vantage point. 

The themes and backdrop to these pieces of poetry are very well-known, however they might appear disguised to some of us. They sometimes talk about heavy concepts like the detachment of our souls from the materialistic scenario, or sometimes about the importance of inner solace and harmonic existence. There are simple ideas as well—like faith in destiny, loneliness, illusions vs. reality, the inevitability of the cyclical nature of life, and untainted feelings of love and affection. In the last few lines, the poems end with a deeper thought that we can brood over, and it initiates a wider array of emotions that stay with the readers. The disclosures and the revelations that can be found in the book are merely doorways to much bigger philosophical stances, and they can appear as ‘food for thought’ for any thirsty soul. 

“Even if I was a saint 

and knew all my prayers,

I’d still ask God for rosaries and favours.

I wonder if I can find him at all;

He told me to look around.

Only till I gathered he’s at home,

And I didn’t know it at all.”

Some of the poems allow the ambiguity to linger a little too much, and thereby the thoughts get disconnected at times. The consistency of the poem’s influence and the impact could have been better, and although some of the poems are to-the-point and classic, some die out before they’ve entirely expressed what they had started with. The poems, however, manages to give a bird’s eye view to the world and our existence, and it doesn’t become an imposition in the long run. When read between the lines, there is a prospect of open-mindedness and acceptance that seems to broaden our horizon regarding our personal perceptions of things. There are certain aspects of life that cannot be expressed as a concrete paragraph of words, and they want to be catered to in the form of poems and free thoughts. Poems in “Reflections of a Mind” put forward some of these aspects of life in the form of clouds that float around you, sometimes engulfing and sometimes appearing diluted….until you manage to consolidate them enough to bring forth a drizzle of life, loss, and hope. I would recommend this book to all dreamers out there. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an expert in poetry or not, your takeaway from these bunch of poems should be a positive addition to your life. Go forth and grab a copy here!

Reach out to the author at @thinkthesethings and show him some love. 

Share: