Book Review
By Ratna Manucha
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Echoes of My Heart
By Harjit Lally
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Echoes of My Heart, Harjit Lally’s debut book reads true to its name. The poems are filled with tenderness and ache in equal measure, capturing not only the exhilaration of love but also the quiet devastation of absence. With 37 poems and three short stories, it is a tender collection which showcases love blooming, breaking and quietly surviving in memory long after one has finished reading the book.
In Echoes of My Heart, love does not merely arrive and leave, but it lingers on in the memories and the quiet ache of longing. The words resonate so deeply and hit hard that one can actually feel the joy of love gained and the pain of love lost, as felt by the poet. In fact, as I turned the pages, to me the collection felt more like pages from a deeply cherished diary. This is not a collection to be read once and shelved. It is the kind of book one returns to for comfort and companionship.
Written with startling honesty, the poems carry a strange tenderness. Vulnerable and deeply evocative, these poems read like fragments of conversations the heart continues to have long after love has left the room.
In ‘Hope’, ‘Love’, and ‘To Love Once Again’, Harjit actually showcases the resilience of us humans as she writes about keeping the faith alive even though one may have suffered heartbreak, and not let the adage, ‘Once bitten twice shy’, rule one’s life. Unrequited love in ‘Smile’ is a beautifully poignant poem that tugs at the heartstrings.
In ‘Autumn Leaves’, Harjit talks about the heart drying up like the leaves in autumn as her love flies off to a distant country whereas ‘From India to the UK’ is all about excitement in the hope of meeting her beloved again.
Love in these pages is not grand or theatrical. It is intimate, fragile and deeply human.
There is a haunting simplicity to the collection that resonates deeply with the reader. The poet has laid bare her heart and has shared her emotional journey through life with her readers.
The three short stories, titled ‘Red Ruby’, ‘A Confession’, and ‘Parting Reunion’, also have love as their essence, albeit in different forms.
This is a book to savour slowly, one poem at a time. Honest and haunting, the poems are a reminder that love and loss are rarely opposites. They are echoes of the same heartbeat.
The protagonist could be you. It could be me.
(Ratna Manucha, columnist and author of 36 published books and numerous short stories and poems, lives, dreams and writes in Dehradun, her happy place).
