By: Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee
Virgil once told, “Love conquers all things; let us too surrender to Love.” Nowadays a lot of new poets are writing on love in the social media blogs. I read many such poems on love. In Virginia Commonwealth University I was reading a few young poets of India. I was suddenly stuck by the lines, of some poems and that was the first time I got connected to Leena Thampi of Chennai. She is not exactly a native of Tamilnadu but born in Jammu. I noticed that Leena writes on love but there is an attempt in her poetry to go beyond and for reaching out to broader frontiers of life. She talks of love in sensuous language sometimes but these sensuous idioms are a poetic feast enjoyed by a truly poetic soul. She writes for nurturing the aspirations of the soul. She writes from her own heart and she is careful not to have any imprint of the great poets whom she reads now and then though she is not a student of literature. Leena proves that for being a poet one need not be from literature background. Her father was an Army officer and that gave her profuse experience for meeting varied situations in life. She saw new places and men She gathered new experiences. All cannot be recorded as in a diary. But Leena sometimes recapitulates and chews the cud of memory to dive deeper into the realms of memory and imagination. She filters the real experiences and the outcome of her four volumes of marvelous poems.
In The Autumn Musings, I felt her language to be lusty when she writes boldly. “Their hearts intertwined in the vineyard, /On her lips every kiss felt like wine/and in his arms her love blossomed, safe and divine./The evening rain fell on her cheeks like silver sparkling beads, /Love sprouted in the season.” The poems in Leena Thampi’s “Embers To Flames” are grounded in a mysterious feast. It is a somewhat known world but there are the underlying moments of humour and sadness. The poems portray modern women whose words are power. They use words to fight out the dark forces of the world. This book provides positive vibes and nurture the aspirations of souls. I was stunned to know that the young Leena Thampi is the author of four books and she is a well known poet in her circles and whose poems many have been reading in the social media for a long time. She is from Jammu and brought up in Delhi.
She being the daughter of an Army Officer moved from one part of India to the other parts even as a child. She had her schooling in Delhi Air Force Golden Jubilee School and in Julian Day School in Kolkata. She did her graduation from Kerala University and here also her Post Graduate in commerce. She had completed CA Inter and also got certified in TEFL. Leena took interest in multiple areas and studied Child psychology, and got certified as Relationship coach. She’s a successful Entrepreneur too. Leena is working as one of the Directors in HAVL Hiteck Pvt Ltd in Chennai. But even in her busiest schedule, writing has always been her passion and basically a poet she penned her lines whenever she got a few minutes. She was s studious girl in school doing all extra-curricular activities. She had passion for all fine arts including singing though quite paradoxically she took to commerce stream for her studies.
She has four books to her credit. Rhythms of a Heart (2020) published from Notion Press is her poetic debut. , Autumn Blaze (2021) from Bluerose Publishers, An Allusion To Time (2022) and Embers To Flames (2022) from Evince Publication What is more important, she has been a part of many anthologies. Many prestigious literary honours were bestowed on her including the Rabindranath Tagore Honours from Sipay with the World Writers Forum and Independence Day Honors and Gujarat Sahitya Academy. She is one of the Editors in the most prestigious literary magazine and Newspaper “Writers Tribune”. Her fifth upcoming book is a collection of short stories and her books are available from Amazon, Flipkart and Evince Publishers.
Leena believes that the foundation should be strong and schooling is the best stage for building up the edifice of values of life. She started writing at the age of 9 in school magazines and went on to write many articles in the Indian Express and Times of Oman Supplementary Thursday magazine. She is a voracious reader and her range is really varied. Her favourite poets include William Butler Yeats, William Wordsworth, John Keats and even Rumi and Khalil Gibran. Frankly she confessed that she herself did not read much of poetry except that of the legendary writers. But she is careful not to imitate unknowingly and get overloaded with their style into her own writing. She wants her signature to be her own style. She knows that Poetry more than lyrical arrangement of vocabulary and it works on a symbolical level. Her poetic voice is unique for its originality. In prose, she loves to read Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Paulo Coelho, Jeffrey Archer, Colleen Hoover, Sidney sheldon, and Namita Gokhale. Her non-fiction inspiration is Robin Sharma, Joseph Murphy, Hector Garcia and many others. As a poet she wants to write beautiful and interesting poetry in a simple way that facilitates understanding. The lengthy, complicated stuffs are her abhorrence. Imageries play a vital role and real verses ooze straight from her heart and that is why she is so popular with her readers.
“Embers To Flames” is an attempt to weave a whole gamut of ideas woven in an alluring tapestry of art. Each piece is individualistic, shaped out of her own sensibility at varying points in time. It’s all about powerful women. Every woman out there can relate to this intriguing collection. In Parijata , she writes, “The tree grew up to be its owner’s pride/howbeit the branches bearing exotic flowers danced always in Virtue’s courtyard./Waking her up at dawn with its divine fragrance. /She picks up the moon laid blessings from the ground reliving her past.
In ‘Ink from My Soul’ she “woke up from a maze dream, pulled by conflicting covet.” Despite being hit by the breeze,/ the beautiful flowers never cease to love the zephyr deeply/ Some flowers are like that/… they neither need spring to bloom nor winter to wither”. Just brilliant thoughts and sheer poetic lines. In An Allusion To Time there is the same flow of poetic thoughts. It is a great quality that any poet is understood even before she says anything clearly. T. S. Eliot wrote, genuine poets can communicate before it is understood.” So is the poetry of Leena whose poetry need not be read fully, they communicate a lot when you start reading her lines in all the four books. (The author is currently Affiliate Faculty of English Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond and a multilingual writer who can be reached at bhattacharjr@vcu.edu)
