Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar's Blog, page 8

The Planet of Love

Within a raindrop there must be a heart- a heart that weeps the pain of longing. Look at her...

Reading ‘Sentinel’ by Vinod Khanna

In history, there have been several attempts to define poetry, worldwide: Wordsworth defines poetry...

Meenu Mehrotra’s new anthology, Dreamlit Nights is a...

Meenu Mehrotra’s new anthology, Dreamlit Nights is a collection of a hundred love poems, beautifully crafted, and rich in their imagery.

Meenu, the best-selling author of two novels, is as versatile in poetry as she is in prose.

The one hundred poems selected for this anthology capture the poet at her creative best. They offer an insight into the mind of a highly romantic soul where love is not just about physical closeness and carnal desire, but an intertwining of souls and achieving of spirituality in togetherness.

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection. Her poetry is forceful and passionate. The poems are sublime, sometimes sensual, always intense. They carry the reader to a realm of mysticism and beyond.

Her poems display vivid imagery….she paints with letters and her canvas illuminates with a mosaic of emotions. She draws the reader along as she talks of pain, longing, desire, surrender, hope, adventure and romance.

Personification is used beautifully in many poems. She talks of a “gurgling brook” “dancing” on its way, “running” past mountains and “snaking” its way through dark jungles.

The pictures she paints is so vivid, you can practically see it in your mind’s eye. I crave your words dipped in the ink of my joy. (Poem 26). One image that particularly strikes me is from Poem 47 where the urgency of a lover to meet the beloved is seen in these lines - I want to crumple the day like a sheet of white paper, I want to tear the night into a million pieces, the stars falling off, the moon shredded. Each day & each night that lies between us like a chasm, deep.

Meenu is the compulsive dreamer - I light the dream each day, like a candle at the altar - Poem 25 - whose dreams flow unheeded, with abandon, and what culminates is the magic of words that capture her inner being.

I wish Meenu all the very best in her journey as a poet and hope that we get to read many more anthologies written by her in the years to come.