When one’s deep-seated emotions skim to the surface and find a voice, the result is a soul-stirring anthology of poems called Myriad of Dreams!
Myriad of Dreams boasts of seventy-five poems where the element of storytelling is evident. The imminence of the seasonal cycle and its abundant natural beauty form the pivot for poems like Autumn Musings, A Wintry Night, Spring is Here and Summer Spell.
Wandering into the human world, Nisha explores the seamless repository of emotions that circle around loss, grief, and coping. Broken Dreams, Final Adieu and Remembering You especially tug at the reader’s heart.
The anthology gets infused with a robust dose of nationalism as we read about our men in the Armed Forces. Our hearts swell with patriotic fervour when the poet says “Every soul is stirred as Vande Mataram echoes in the air”.
The stark tonal shift to the philosophical is evident in poems like Victory of Good Over Evil, When I am Gone, The Arched Bow and Search Your Soul. In these pieces, the mood is one of deep deliberation, self-realisation, and of accepting the inevitable.
When we fall in love, we rise in so many unexpected ways. However, losing the love of our life can plummet us into the depths of despair where life becomes dismal and burdensome, as articulated in verses like Can Never Say Goodbye, The Last Letter (the final stanza here is a killer!), Timeless Love and Unfulfilled Desire.
Nisha celebrates the limitless power and indomitable mettle of the human soul in pieces like Unafraid to Fly, Undaunted Spirit of Mumbai, I am not Ashamed and Two Strands of Grey. Liberation from one’s own misgivings, the spirit of determination and resilience, and the courage to accept one’s flawed, imperfect self, mark this set of poems. A Woman So Divine is an ode to every woman and her inner beauty and radiance. Living in Fear is a hard-hitting number that condemns marital rape.
However, the ones that really stole my heart are World’s Greatest Treasure, You are Special, and You Know You are in Love When…. These poems are high on emotion and revolve around the poet’s family. The accompanying family photographs stand testimony to the loving, sacred bond they share and invite the reader to soak in their spirit of bonhomie.
The seventy-five poems are structured mostly as quatrains where the alternate lines rhyme. A few are made into rhyming couplets. The carefully selected quote and image headlining each poem prepares us for what is to follow.
Personally, I would have liked to have a smattering of punctuation in the poems for the sake of clarity, closure and to indicate a shift in thought.
Nisha Tandon’s motley assemblage of themes, messages and rich vocabulary, form a rich warp and weft which, when put together, create a beautiful poetic tapestry which is bound to excite, elate and inspire the readers.
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Published earlier on Penmancy, Amazon and Goodreads
