Title: Thoughts Alight
Author: Kawtar Elmrabti
Genre: Poetry
First Publication: 2020
Language: English
Book Summary: Thoughts Alight by Kawtar Elmrabti
A doorway to a secret garden is an inspirational and beaming dive to the thoughts of a passionate writer.
Each chapter holds the symbol of a petal containing a multitude of thoughts crowned with passion, love, light, hope and kindness.
Book Review: Thoughts Alight by Kawtar Elmrabti
It is one of the mysteries of the human mind that nothing can be thought without eliciting a feeling, and nothing can be felt without eliciting a thought; and that moods and beliefs, so apparently separate, are really deeply intertwined. Without this deep bond between concept and affect, poetry would hardly be possible, seeing as it plays on the hidden cords that stretch between our sensory, cognitive, and emotional worlds, finding strange harmonies in disparate sources, revealing hitherto unimagined connections in our inner architecture. And since love—and its dark twin, loss—resides at the center of this poetry book, poet Kawtar Elmrabti has much to work with.
Thoughts Alight by Kawtar Elmrabti evokes romance and revolution in my consciousness, a riot of metaphors impregnated with sui generis imagery, an intense celebration of love and beauty, a flood of high emotions that assails my senses and then dulls them. Everything else blacks out and I’m transported to a world I have never seen before – and it’s beautiful, it is magnificent, it is dancing with the joy of love, hope, self conception, and meditative thoughts!
There are very few poets who so brilliantly marries nature’s metaphors of earth, sea, wind, trees, moon, stars with the enchanting anatomy of the beloved. Every line testifies to poet Kawtar Elmrabti’s unique way of perceiving nature; she likens the beloved to nature, her beloved becomes nature. As you might expect of youthful love poetry, this book is full of ardor, of lust, of desperation, and of the deepest tenderness. The sky is pulled apart, the sea is drained, the stars are rearranged, the forests are uprooted, and the world itself is bent into new shapes in poet’s attempt to express her heart.
I took my time reading this, choosing to savor the succulent, vivid, tactile words. And I must say, these poems are luscious! I feel their imagery as much as visualize it.
It is hard to make selections from this book; every poem is a work of wonder. Instead of copying many full-length poems, I am sampling some lines to show the luxuriant quality of imagery and the thunderous motion of her poems, the finesse of her thought, and the intensity of her style. Below is one of my favourite poems from the collection Thoughts Alight by Kawtar Elmrabti:
An Afterglow Loving whispers Bodies intertwined like tangled wires I find the place to lay my head As our freckles align like constellations Pressed against your skin Entangled limbs As to where you and I begin You woke my sleeping senses And warmed me to the bone Together we move as one In the splendid moment I see moonlight dancing in your eyes Together in the afterglow Locked in love’s sweet embrace You’re the starlight In between my midnight eyes Our Love’s ballet Crowned with splendor Afterglow lover’s blush Passionate blood rush I lose myself in your beam Our fingers lock like magnets Blending into one I’m yours and you’re mine Your skin, the canvas My fingertips, the paintbrush Every touch, every glide upon it Create a mark unlike any other Writing our tale Lulling you into dreams with my fingers Waking you when sunlight creeps up the sheets Our hearts and breaths in sync Laying in the afterglow Longing to paint our lives In splendid memories Days filled with bliss and passion Sun shining on our tangled silhouettes Our Love’s ballet, an endless glow
