Review: Prism of Love in The Purple Moon

All poems are love poems on some level. Whether about love of life, death, or everything in between, poems isolate and pinpoint the most sublime parts of life anyone can imagine. However, love, and poetry, can be deceptively simple. This simplicity is the highlight of Neelam Saxena Chandra's book of poetry, The Purple Moon. Beginning with the unique concept of a whole book of poems in which life is seen through the prism of love, Neelam takes on a series of relationships, romantic, familial, platonic, through the dimension of this nebulous emotion. In fact, love isn't an emotion in this book of poetry. It is a state of being. Every wave of love that goes through this prism shines on some unexpected aspect of love that we tend to know and accept, but only recognize when we put them in words.

One of my favorite poems uses a deceptively simple metaphor of the hyphen. Neelam writes in the first stanza of Radha-Krishna:

"Whenever she wished
To put a full stop,
He put a hyphen
And let the story
Begin again
Like another fairy tale
Where anticipations grow,
Where desires glow
And where
Love shines."

It is important to note that Neelam is an Indian author living in India so both the cultural and aesthetic quality of her poems is influenced by this experience. Before I had read Neelam's book of poems, in my "American ignorance," I had not heard of the famous Hindu Radha-Krishna love story in which a love affair is seen as an union between the human soul and the divine, manifested in the physical.

It is this spiritual and physical union that I see uniquely at play in Neelam's ambitious book of poems. Americans tend to emphasize one over the other depending on what type of love is spoken about--and many times the physical and/or spiritual is referenced in such a way that is detrimental to the whole mission of love in the relationship between those in love or experiencing love.

For Neelam, all experience is love, but only though a specific prism, perhaps always under the "purple moon" do we really see beyond the shimmering light to the true nature, into the evergreen nature of love.

The Purple Moon is available online at https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=qIlFAwAAQBAJ