🌺LOVE IS A LOT OF WORK❤
The poetic reality in ✴️Love is a Lot of Work✴️ . (September 8th, 2011 original date of Review) (Publishing date November 2022)
The volume of poetry 🥀“Love is a Lot of Work”🥀 extends poetic vision in which he meditates upon passion, knowledge and purpose with which the modern world is so much occupied that even the nomenclature ‘Love’ has become a pun word paradoxically and symbolically. The ‘Love is lot of work’ is described by the wary poet in this way through the far-fetched images: In the modern civilization love, on one hand is an ‘escaping strand’ for a beloved and to a motorbike rider it is a ‘fright, strange way of fun’, while on the other hand the thought of love is a ‘storm for angry shareholders over imagined dividends at the Luncheon meeting’ than a delight. A splintered dream which the ‘past tornadoes’ have buried deep, is a love for the withered leaves who have been stripped from the twig. The poet says love and work are an intimidation and it is as similar as to ‘the death of prejudiced ghosts. ’ The progressive heritage is trapped in the love for work just like - A cyclone cellar
Where you yourself will be hidden
From your psyche, ego and libido
Where thoughts can peek at the forbidden (‘Your Look-Alike Speeds By)
The poet expresses his personal observation, thought, memory, disposition, values and justifies that all emotional quotients related to work are transformed into a new identity of love in the materialistic life of the world.
The beautiful scathing imagery penetrates readers’ insight to view the nemesis that is understood by human beings as to pretend to save the mother-earth and to suspend the regression of the people. It is a sheer paradox because the internal agitation of the ecological imbalances and the external agitation of the common masses reveal the piteous state of corrupt-ridden, biased, violent society. But in reality these conditions are not mere emotional, physical and social problems, rather these are the source to be counter-productive to search new ways of loving the work. The poet in his poems manifests the radical self-contradiction, the modern mentality that is psychologically a paranoiac state that wishes to explore novel wonders of freedom. The invention to facilitate one’s life with progressive potentialities is falling human beings’ standards of triumphs. They are falling into one crisis after another crisis, it has become a trance to let life go on; they are caught in a trap to keep life occupied with love to work and love to relish life with leisure past-times. In the poem ‘A Slice of Life’ the poet narrates the seductive thoughts gamble and they are like the travel brochures that ‘addict the life progressively and compulsively and that do not go away as easily as water off a mallard’s back’ and every imagination and thought becomes a loveable ‘sense that wanted a piece of the sizzle’.
The poems “My Memory of You”; “Love is a Lot of Work”; “Recession hits Love” projects that men, women and children in the modern mechanised techno- centric age have no time to cherish the nature’s creations and to love solitude and meditation. They have a lot of work to finish whether to delight oneself with the watching of romantic films, listening to debatable speeches of politicians or to engross into reading/ partying in order to be wizards of intellect. It is a passion burning the desire of love in the furnace of competition and sustenance. This cutting edge race in the poem “A Dream Away” depicts how the world is creating another class of romancers who shade their incapacities into being fugitives which is expressed well in the lines:
“We can again feel together
Grieve together
Hope together”.
The poet not only elaborates poignancy of beautiful images, but he vivaciously exaggerates the truth that each symbol shows its relationship with the real worldly circumstances in silence and in life’s pleasures. He situates metaphorically the reality with the make-shift signs of the modern dreams that are spoilt by the conditioning and by hopes, which only ‘fill some extended empty spaces’ either by weird dreams, that are vacuumed dusted, unshackled, unrestrained with no moorings, lay drenched in sea-water ------or on a busy rush hour pavement like the dead drunkard’. For the poet the love, the work, the thought, the dream are like females who play ‘complicated games to articulate the crush’ which is hidden, enchanting, arresting, sultry, child like simple, mysterious, make-believe and evocative and intimate, that makes man run rather to ride and perish.
The poetic reality is vividly drawn through effective imagery that images the choice, anguish, and the purpose of an existentialist person for whom the power of willingness lies in demystifying the propositions of love which is essentially nothing than to separate silence from the dreams and to affiliate dreams with a love for lots of work. The poetic reality actually purges poet’s sense of fear and hope, the thoughts expressed in imitation psychologically unravel the impurities of the poets’ experiences but it also evoke a sense of psychological cleansing of perceiver and the readers who have tried to thrive on the stolen dreams of the western life and have forgotten the love of emancipation. The poet warns the readers in the poem ‘Forgot Me Not’:
A simple plot
With elevated thoughts
Laced
With Pleasure and pain
Wheels through time
Hungry as the wolf
At the banquet
Which is already over
The poem
That springs
Storms and swears
That it lies
The last line of each of his short lyricism is unpunctuated, that refers to his unresolved crisis, untoward ending that foresees anarchy in the realm of love, undiminished passion to search a way out to positive infinity, continuous attempt to integrate modern radical self- contradiction with changing directions or with ‘ illusionary or distracting agitation’. The unpunctuated last line also denotes quest for an escape ‘from the place one goes when one needs to escape’. It also delineates the unfulfilled promises and interrelated bargaining with the thoughts that begins, then act and finally explode scattered calls and thrills of the poet’s anguish.
The poet Shri Rajiv Khandelwal with his intellect and literary spark has spelled the poetic pleasure with the usage of references from Greek literature, Chinese Literature and Ancient Indian Literature that not only appears to transcend the continuous flow of his vision into imaginary thoughts, but adds enlightening effect upon his catharsis who perceives that human mind when become crazy to get afflicted with pain and melancholy, it is ecstatically holding traditional Daoism that believes things and beings are fundamentally one. When poet refers to Circe and Odysseus, he not only refers to their ‘Love’ that indeed captivated a warrior in order to pursue his navigated mind into an enigma where Circe tears slip into his mawkish heart and ‘charred Honeymooning pain’. Odysseus and Circe’s love symbolise the present state of weariness, because Odysseus could not resist his temptation to proceed on his journey; the poet presents the lament of his departure from Circe in this way:
Like before
After all,
What is there to live for?
If one has nothing to lose
Similarly the provoking images built by the artist of Greece in the 5th century B.C. are the vivid impressions of memories and meaningful sensations, but they hold no longer that ingenuity and subjective tear because of the violation of the code of ethics by the poets in the drama and in songs. These images of atavistic incarnations are like dreams that hold culture as prisoner and torments modern people perceptions ‘with a faint brush of familiarity’. The poet mesmerises the readers with his intense thoughts that walk with him to connect the tradition with his individual talent and with the historical sense. The poem ‘You and the Lily Pond’ shows that how ambience intoxicates the feelings and thoughts and can add infinite beauty and truth, if the human mind flutters in the midst of nature in place of artificial relationships. He says alienated self is stronger when:
Soars unfettered
Then
Drops
Mercilessly
Easily
Naturally
Like the red rose
Lying alone
Amongst wind torn shrubs
In conclusion it is apt to commend the poet’s poetic talent who acknowledges the trespass, the weaknesses, and the faults and these inflict deprivation of sanctity among the common men. They are in present age lonely to understand the fear of the love of God and who do not fear the agony to depart from the sins. Their darkness declares the glory in the ‘Love’ where there is lot of work but no historical beauty and eternal truth.
The poetic reality in ✴️Love is a Lot of Work✴️ is vividly drawn
through effective imagery, Khandelwal metaphorically
situates reality with the make-shift signs of the modern
dreams that are spoilt by conditioning and by hopes. With
his intellect and literary spark he has spelled poetic
pleasure with REFERENCES from Greek literature,
Chinese Literature and Ancient Indian Literature. It is apt
to commend the poet’s poetic talent.
September 8th, 2011
