Book Review

Live Love Light

An Anthology of poems by Parneet Jaggi

Published by Writer Workshop, Kolkata

ISBN 978-93-5045-93-2,

Total Page 76, Year 2015, Prize 150

Life is a great mystery. Poetry comes to convey this mystery and its meaning to the dwellers of the world. To understand poetry is perhaps more difficult than to write it simply because the poet is alone when he meditates and compose poem. But when a poem reaches in the hands of various kinds of persons, the man who interprets it has to be more cautious than the poet himself because the interests, the nature and intellectual gifts of all persons differ from one another in every respect. Some poets do not require any interpreters because they write in a simple way. Their poetry is thought provoking and philosophical. Parneet is one of such poets. She makes effort to organize her thoughts and feelings into a coherent, unified worldview. Her poems record thoughts and feelings experienced naturally over the course of life. Her second anthology Live Love Light the best example of this.

Live Love Light is a bunch of fifty eight beautiful poems written in a very reflective mood by a sensitive and spiritually inclined personality. In the very first poem ‘Lesson of Life’ Parneet yearns to surrender herself to the divine design. Her staunch faith in God is clearly visible. She was born in a Sikh family and Sikhism is the thread which binds all the poems in this anthology.

In Sikhism, it is claimed that only in human form, the living entity has the intelligence to understand divine laws and thus the soul could hope to free itself from the cyclical bondages of births, deaths and rebirths. It is asserted that the soul has ability to reach God only after being born in a human body. This thought is inherent in the poems of Live Love Light.    

In ‘Surrender’ she is very close to Swami Vivekananda who in his poem ‘Quest for God’ sings:

…….. it is He.
When dire calamity seizes me,
The heart seems weak and faint,
All natures seems to crush me down,
With laws that never bend.
Me seems I hear Thee whispering sweet
My love, "I am near", "I am near". 

            ‘Shower of Joy’ reminds me W. H. Davies’ poem ‘Leisure’. In the similar mood she says that beauty is scattered in nature around us and we have no time to look and enjoy it, perhaps because “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”  So, she suggests “Let us relish showers of joy/and drive away all the gloom.” In ‘Chords’ she says that the things of nature and the events of world definitely cause trouble and vexation of spirit. In ‘Karma’ she marvels “Logic fails to calculate karmas/ Why need a record?” In poem ‘Brick and Cement’ she points out that all desires that perplex and bewilder us are certainly false and meaningless as they cannot satisfy and give happiness to us.

‘Go Home Ma’ is one of the best poems in English poems that I have read on the subject female foeticide. The consolation give by unborn girl to her mother definitely has power to bring tears in the eyes of humanity. In this anthology two poems are explicitly written on women: one is ‘The Woman’ and another is ‘Joys of a Woman’. Through poems like ‘God Chose You’, ‘A Free Gift’, ‘A Gift’, ‘The Ultimate Dwelling’ Parneet presents herself a very sensitive thinker and spiritually inclined poet. In the poem ‘Pain of a Koel’ she explodes the popular myth that Koel’s song is synonymous with beauty and perfection. The song is not of fullness and fertility but of the pangs of separation. Even the song of a koel is unable to express the depth of its sorrow.     

 Parneet’s greatest achievement as a poet of inwardness is her brilliant, diamond-hard language. Word and mood are intrinsically woven in the poems of Live love light. She writes aphoristically, meaning that she compresses a great deal of meaning into a very small number of words even then this can not make her poems hard to understand on a first reading.