Book review: Expressing poetic emotions through blank verse
“In Passing” by Radhika Thatte George is a collection of poetry with the title of the book being taken from the title of the last poem in the book. The poems are mostly in blank verse.
It’s not an easy task to economize on words and express maximum emotion in minimum words. That is something the poet has beautifully done in these poems.
The poems are about a wide range of experience about different situations, on different people.
The book is indeed aesthetic with sketches and short poems.
The poems seem very simple, often a set of words loosely held together with a light floating sense of emotion but it makes you think over the content again and again in your mind and that’s when the depth of the poems come to surface.
The poems are on normal day to day past experiences of the author, but it reflect that how beautifully the mundane nature of life can be adorned, just with a few wise use of words; and words only.
It also deals with emotions like love, anger, melancholy, overwhelming happiness.
The poems are based on a wide range of things and this is what increases the spectrum of the situations and stories told in form of poems in the book.
It has stories about cousins, about lonely nights and even a poem named the tea vendor, which has beautifully been used as a metaphor for hiding the underlying comparison of the tea vendor with life. It’s these little things that make the poems beautiful.
Overall, i’d rate the book 7.5/10.
(Reviewed by Soumashree Mukherjee)
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