Review of Two poems of Carys Hughes

 Two poems of Carys Hughes

I request the readers to first read the poems from the above link and then read my review. Thanks.

I look for expressions of sensitivities, bonding, love, trauma, pain and loneliness in the poems penned by female poets. They excel male poets very much in these expressions and the genuineness of the pain and narration is their strength. It will be foolish to generalize that female poets don’t come out equally strong on other expressions and contents. Carys Hughes' both poems are like pebbles thrown into a quiet intellectual lake. The ripples the two poems create are thought provoking.

The title of the first poem 'Temperance' hints at self restraint. A common occurrence during a rainy season has been used as a metaphor as the poet revisits the popular quote of Karl Marx ‘Religion is the opium of masses.’ The children are looking for something other than god in the act of nature. They want to decipher the seasonal and calamitous acts of nature. They are believers but not addicted to religion. The evening and the night both are infinite, figurative of the endless time frame of the evolution of mankind. There is incompleteness in understanding the status of God as institutionalized by human mind and nature which is the personification of the almighty in every way. Both are ascribable to conditioned mind set of adults. We need to trace the childish quest to understand everything as it is without any inhibition, the children in the poem too are metaphors this way. The poem reminds us about the never ending dialogue between nature and man. Man’s wisdom is incomplete till he strives to understand nature.

Second poem’s title 'August' is an adjective of the elite world of an intellectual which is always upstage for common minds. The poem subtly points the mute witnessing of intellectuals when the voices of the marginalized are suppressed. The birds under iron feet symbolize the chocking of free minds under despotism. The light morning brought didn’t illuminate the world of the impoverished masses. The other metaphor moon in this poem symbolizes the eruditeness of the majority of intellectuals who are only book warms always proud of the borrowed knowledge. The intellectuals’ destinations never coincide with that of the common man. Both the poems are rich in content and are modern.