Flares of Love

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Flares of Love

Flares of Love (Paperback) – August 10, 2016 by Arti Rai & Shekhar Tiwari (Author)

Paperback: 91 pages

Publisher: Cyberwit.net (August 10, 2016)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 9385945319

ISBN-13: 978-9385945311

Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,380,630 in Books

Reviewed by Gopikrishnan Kottoor

This is a two-in–one book of poems. It has the voices of the younger poet Arti Rai and a senior Shri Shekhar Tiwari. Interestingly their poems meet each other’s as though meeting face to face. Interestingly the book ‘Flares of Love’ suggests a bond, a genuineness of the poets’ fraternity.

Love as Shekhar see it has the aspect of ‘Belonging shamelessly to each other’ (What If). As though in answer, Arti is convinced of the need for space in love’s togetherness as Khalil Gibran said… and so she seeks her lover in the garden of life ‘You as you and me as me‘ (The Beginning).

Just as the caption and the cover design shows, flares of love set aflame the entire book. Arti is truthful as she dreams her dreams of love and in Shellyan mode talks of love coming towards lovers with ‘ the halo of a nimbus Cupid cloud like dove flying towards us… (The Starry Night). Note the nice word image ‘ Cupid cloud’. Likewise Shekhar knows of ‘ the reflection of love of pleasure with the pain of our tiny kiss’ (A Tiny Kiss)

Arti will live in a fantasy world where it won’t really matter if the lover does not show up. For love is unison, like the earthworm beneath the soil bed, frog of the deep well, or grasses of the atmosphere fused into one (Doesn’t Matter). This oneness of love even in the physical absence of the lover forms a central thread in most of Arti’s love poems. Shekhar’s love is more rooted in reality and is in the physical ‘ To the wet flowers, yellow, Purple and pink, and half truth to the auto driver who drove us along your pink city… and the woman covers him with Meera’s love for Krishna (Human God).

The similarity in both the poets is that love lifts them to the skies, making Arti heavenly, and Shekhar, a human God. Love becomes an unquenchable thirst in Arti, hidden in her pensive heart.

Poetry becomes rain, waltzing across mesmerizing clouds for her to be mused in her lover’s colours (My Poems). Shekhar would instead say that love would mean that he would be his beloved’s as ‘nail and finger ‘ (In Denial). It is interesting to come across such dichotomies in this little innocently made out book of verse.

Arti is sensuous and sensate, though she is very much caught in her own dream world of love. She lives predominantly in a Radhae world ‘What if you forget me in the womb of the future’ (In Future). Shekar in turn takes on a Krishna approach ‘I seek great pleasure in this game of hide and seek ‘ (Hide And Seek).

Arti also uses paintings (Village paintings and rustic scenes), poems by her favourite poets (Spotless), to inspire her own poetry. Shekhar looks around, searching objects from nature to spin his own ‘Like a misty canopy over a body of water’ (You). Shekhar’s genuine affection for colurs comes out vibrantly in his poems.

Beyond this point, both Arti and Shekhar need to lift themselves and come out more into the realities around them. Perhaps I am thinking of their need to diversify themes , or even to bring in more dimensions of reality to their pleadings of love. Perhaps the poets do that, or they certainly will, in later books of verse that we await from them.