Is Love just Rainbows and Roses ?

RATING: ★★★  (3/5)

Special thanks to Angana, for helping me out on this. Her insights and views laid the foundation for this review. She can be found at @angana.exe. 

Sometimes love seems like a sun-kissed, bright and heavenly blissful feeling, but is it just that?

In the Love Thoughts section, ‘Thoughts Alight Poetry” preaches to convey this warm, fuzzy, and infinitely optimistic aspect of love. Through charming and endearing verses, the poet paints a fairy-tale picture of love in all its bounty. In the duration of reading the initial few poems, this un-tainted overly simplistic portrayal of love comes out to be very soothing and mellow, but as Angana pointed out, the extensive use of overly positive imageries and nature metaphors set the mood for unconditional romance, only to feel stretched after a while. The complex array of the metaphorical ideas was often too fragmented and instead of reinforcing the poet’s conveyance, they clouded its meaning. These jumbled-up, overly-romanticized poems thereby only give a too-good-to-be-true notions of beauty and love, and doesn’t successfully delve deeper. According to Angana, there isn’t much of a recollection of the mental attributes of the lovers, or the domesticities and nuances of their personality. The book primarily harps on the unconditional attachment of souls, and expresses love as a pulsating all-mighty singularity. I certainly agree with this. The poems get conveyed to me as being the glittery, sky-high banner that adorns the doorway to the mysterious and puzzling emotion called love, and it doesn’t even try to throw light upon the unexplored, fleeting subtleties of it. Although the poems might be appealing as a simple, sweet, and linear account of beauty and infatuation…to me, the poems never try to touch upon actual ‘love’ in its entirety.

 

The ‘Hope thoughts’ section, in a similar notion, is nothing too fancy or breath-taking. The poems keep on harping on the gaudiness and flowery effects of Hope and optimism but fail to give an unconventional viewpoint that might extract optimism from the darkest of times. At this point, the book becomes overly preachy and advisory. Some of the intense metaphors that speak of Hope and pessimism is really very encouraging, but it continues to avoid the philosophical and analytical elucidation of Hope, and so the verses never really feel touching or uplifting. Angana says, that the words feel like an old friend, comforting and warm, filled with innocence and positivity.

 

The ‘Self Thoughts’ and ‘Meditation thoughts’ were also a bit jumbled and illusory. Angana feels that while the poems should not be treated as an aid for serious self-help, it could definitely be read for a light read and would instill flutters of self-glory in the readers. The motivating ideas of inner peace and the magnanimity of the soul gives a warm touch to the verses, but the concrete theme of the poems seemed to be utterly hard to fathom.

 

I would heartily give my recommendation of this book to the ones who love to float about in the lukewarm, mellow expanse of love…and aren’t really willing to go deeper into the grey ambiguities and dualities of it.

Want to grab a copy? Buy the book here!

Disclaimer: This review is in lieu of a review copy. 

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