SHIMMERING CHIMES Reviewed by Reena Prasad

What else can be more joyful to get such an AWESOME REVIEW by one of the most erudite Poetess of our time, the Editor of TSA, my happiness knows no boundaries today 

smile emoticon Thanks once again from the deep core of my heart Reena Prasad. Here is the first review friends

Shimmering Chimes By MAAYA DEV

When I bring my sadness to the sea,
And I look to the horizon,
from where I stand to eternity
everything's so beautiful.
~Ingrid Goff-Maidoff

These lines came to mind as I opened Shimmering Chimes, a slim volume of 60 poems by Maaya Dev, proof of a life courageously lived. It is a lesson for all of us, less brave than her to dig deep into our selves and unlock our hidden strengths from the treasure chests where they sleep undisturbed and mostly undiscovered.

The forewords and the author's note set the mood and I settled in to read an afternoon's worth of grace and beauty, with a gentle reminder that many of the gifts that Maaya talks about in her poems are blessings which everyone can feel if they tune into her fine poetic sensibility.

Starting with her gentle poem to her favourite flute-player, the ultimate poet, Krishna, she took me through a Frost-like woods to an inner journey of a poet musing about the birth of a poem. I stopped by her 'Blank Diary' and its pages of which she says '(the)thin texture may not bear the accumulated weight, heart carries with so much ease since ages’. '

'Desert Rose', 'Ability beyond disability' and "Confession of a leaf' are tributes to the indomitability of the spirit and I could not help hearing the poet's own heart beating in them.

Brushing aside rejections of all kind, Maaya sashays into the mellow light of an 'Autumn Moon' and muses on the ephemerality of life in 'Fireflies...". More poems followed and in several of them, the poet celebrates unabashedly the joy of being alive, of love, of passion and how the wings of our imagination triumph over the frailties of mere existence. She says, 'For a while/wake me not/ from deep slumber', lines which we can easily identify with, when life gets too stark, too real for us to bear. 'Pearls of Tears' and 'Oasis' are typical Maaya Dev poems, the words in them, falling as gentle as rain. She speaks for all of us in her Mother India poem and in the anguish of a daughter ravaged. She reveals her soul-connect with the divine with a bouquet of poems addressing Krishna.

There are more poems talking about nature, of human longings and of the gifts of life/love and in this book, I see Maaya's poetic sensibility, her courage to accept and fight adversity and her sincere desire to grow as a poet and as a writer coming into bloom.

I plucked each word carefully/from the garden of my small vocabulary says this poetess humbly and I wish her many more beautiful flowers from the gardens of words and life.

-Reena Prasad-

Book is now available at amazon :

Shimmering chimes

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