A Poet's Heart-bookcover

By: Syed Buali Gillani

A Poet's Heart

Pages: 144 Ratings: 4.0
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Lies of night

If the tip of a sun doesn’t wash your ink away,
Then your eye has sinned throw that lamp away,
This darkness like a sigh is the sight of an eye,
With the rise of a sun comes the news of a night,
That which will give a raging fever to your art,
For years has to burn like a flame in your heart,
Every wood brings change when placed in a pyre,
Happy or sad it’s bewildered by a fire,
Filled with memories are your empty eyes,
Full of life but your spirit has died,
A night always comes with a dagger in one hand,
For those happy boarders of a joyful land,
The fire of love burns in those parts of hell,
Where windows of heaven open to drizzle her smell,
And If god lives in heart or so says the Christian man,
Then when a heart is broken does he feel the pain?

I wrote this poem in fear that should a day come where I have to write a synopsis for this book what will I say? Well, this short poem truly encapsulates my story, words, sentences, and paragraphs don’t do justice to art, so “Let the rise of sun be the proof of sun”. Poetry has burnt within me for years. This book is about that fire, I believe every single person in the world has an interesting story to tell, but not all can tell an interesting story. Then there are those stories that are both interesting and intense, those stories are really worth telling. While a neurotic can choke on his own intensity, an artist makes a story out of the flesh of his madness. There is not a lot of difference between the two, except the latter is somehow penetrable.

Syed started writing poetry after the 2005 earthquake which left his home town Muzaffarabad Azad Kashmir in ruins, he lost his only sister, home, relatives and close friends at the age of 10. Syed was interested in learning languages, history and philosophy at a young age. He volunteered to work as an editor’s assistant for ‘Daily Mahasib’ “a prominent newspaper in the city of Muzaffarabad AJK” when he was in high school, he says “it proffered him a unique adroitness”, to look at one word with a thousand different lenses. Syed is a masterful Urdu poet; he was given a ‘Faiz Ahmad Faiz’ award in the “AJK literature festival” by the education minister of Muzaffarabad at age 14 for writing a poem on “the freedom of Pakistan”. His Urdu and Farsi poems have been published in newspapers all over Pakistan for years, he also writes songs. Syed studied Economics in Pakistan before moving to London to join his family, he then went to college and then university to study law afterwards, he dropped out of Law school to study Psychology instead but the same year at age 22 he was blessed with a daughter, half English and half Pakistani. So, as confusing as his life sounds, he says: “I like to brush it with the paint of there’s no place or style of people I haven’t yet met, which is the vigorous voyage through which the world has bequeathed its allegories to me”. At the moment Syed works many odd jobs in London in pursuit of his dreams. He plans to write more poetry books next and publish his novels.

Customer Reviews
4.0
2 reviews
2 reviews
  • Thomas walker

    Astute, distinctive, daring, ironic!

    I don’t know how to give this book a review, apart from its one of its kinds. This is a first book by this author. I can only wait and see what’s more to come… as I have read his work elsewhere on the internet and I already know that Gillani has moved away from this rigid formalism in his writing. I have watched his videos and have read his online poems… it’s dark and almost goes into deconstruction (depths) he constantly plays on the edges and boundaries of language. This book is just scratching the surface of what is to come. Gillani I believe wrote majority of the poems here in his teen-ages when he was still learning the language, so you can clearly see here a lack of let’s say complex imagery and a lot of his ideas are two-layer there’s a body and mind separation in his images and a lot of deep (accomplished) sort of formal emotion. Which is not a bad thing, it’s like a developmental stage of how a language and idea develops. He throws in a lot of psychoanalysis. I don’t know what type of poetry this is, there are a lot of different genres in here, he has categorised it hisself. But this is a must read to get a foundational understating of what is to come.

  • Laura Hawryluck

    This is a very unique book- full of allegory, and mythologies that harken to the poetry of yore. A tour de force as a first collection in English, this book uses a variety of poetic styles to capture layered imagery from classics to modern times. I found myself remembering and reflecting on mythology and its messages that are still relevant today. A very powerful book for those who love our interconnection was through the Ages.

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