Friday 28 March 2014

Review by Margaret Virany of 'So This Is Love - Collected Poems by Fiza Pathan'

Aptly Titled, Enriching Verses from a Passionate Poet on the Path to Greatness

Review By  Margaret Virany (Author of A Book of Kells: Growing Up in an Ego Void)

Format:Kindle Edition 

As a very young woman the heroine falls in love, marries, realizes her husband doesn't love her the way she loves him, is betrayed, abandoned, rejected and left empty. She feels ravaged, devoured and trashed by conflicting emotions; it becomes impossible for her either to remember or forget, or to live or die. In So This Is Love, a 115-page journey of 40 poems, Fiza Pathan (a Christian school-teacher from Mumbai, India) takes the reader down into seasons of stormy waters and barren deserts, but finally reaches a sunny, fertile land with a gentle breeze. The easy verse proceeds lyrically, logically and clinically, using no rhyme but lots of imagery of blood, bones, dust, tears, claws, thorns, knives, daggers and other sharp weapons. We go through pain, guilt, witchcraft, necromancy, suicide, alcoholism, insanity, zombieism, cynicism, defiance, hatred and retribution. Then we ascend via fantasy, inner strength, music, contemplation, responsibility, self-therapy, forgiveness, and awareness to a state of control, calm, creativity and hope. At the root of this collection is Pathan's passion as a poet. In the Preface she says the source for every writer of prose is "the single, pure flame that leaps out from the core of your blood and the divinity of His love. You do not speak of yourself but every time you lift your pen to pour out your heart's yearnings onto the papyrus, your duty toward mankind is sealed in it." Pathan's solid grounding in reading the classics from an early age has put her on the path to greatness. In three readings of these poems, I felt myself greatly enriched each time. It is not often that a writer more than 50 years my junior sends me scrambling to Wikipedia to look up an allusion (in this case to Casca). 
For full review read on Amazon

myBook.to/B00IXXXT9K


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