Poetry has always been close to my heart, words, rhythms, rhymes and the sound of the melody has always seemed to have a toll on my senses, in turn heightening them.
The Way that We Are, the sophomore poetry collection of the author, delved inside mediocrity for me. Mediocrity as a value can be made to a highly refined and polished form of a book or a poem too, but in this collection it doesn’t work out, it stays as it’s normal meaning: mediocre.
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Modern poetry, thanks to social media, has become much contested as every writer who can join rhymes and write some words is considered a poem, disjointed sentences without much revelation or meaning are considered poems. The vanity and elitism of poetry gone berseck. This poetry collection, stands on the fine line separating these two extremes, some poems reveling deep inside while some remaining shallow. Though the author’s scope and ideas are large, the execution doesn’t match those heights. The core metaphors and meanings behind the poem would require an additional explanation and don’t explore the meaning or let the reader take the meandering path to understand it.
The prose-paragraphs separating the poems in the collection sound much more refined. But amidst all these there are some poems that strike out, their ideas especially hitting personal points with their meanings and finding them inside the vortex of the pandemonium, the abyss that it has caused inside the human mind and the destruction it has caused in it’s magnanimity. Eloquently taking words from it, the poems do make a higher sense. The ideas of urban loneliness, lost love, losing the human touch and conversation, the twisted morals of the lockdown periods, the gargantuan beast that’s claiming our breaths, makes this pandemic poetry collection of free verse strike a point where you can get the meaning of life in these disturbing times.
With all this said, I must say that Priyam is a writer of keen observation and that’s what required in forming poetry. She does see movement, life in it’s convulated formulations in and as art.
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How did you like the book review of The Way That We Are. Let me know in the comment section…