NARANJAS by Tom Pow

It is a marvelous comeback by Tom Pow through ‘NARANJAS’, a lively poetic collection comprising poems of earthly imagination, remarkable tributes, poet’s insights and experiences. Each overpoweringly eye-catching poem is accompanied by a succinct expression that renders clear that which is too intense and reflective to be directly gazed upon.

SUNFLOWERS depicts Tom’s incisive wit, vast intelligence when he writes “as everything in the world must/devotion is our work”. Moreover, the poem reflects the coercion faced by "Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins”, and the pain when at the last they were brutally killed “for refusing to copulate with Huns”. 

IN A HEATWAVE, MANY YEARS AGO showcases a humorous incident that the speaker had encountered in Sligo. The speaker had parked the car near a graveyard to cool down and soon his children went up straight to the graves to pee while the speaker saves them from doing so. The poet fluctuates the emotions concealed in the poems as we move on reading the book. This poem is quite unlike others, therefore, brings a change in the reader’s frame of mind.

We spied a glade of trees up a side road 

in Sligo. I parked in their shade. A small 

country graveyard. We were all sticky, tired: 

we needed, in cool shadows, to uncoil. 

The children took to the tented paths, 

till I caught sight of my son – almost too late - 

about to bless the chosen epitaph 

of – twice I read it – W. B. Yeats!

Tom’s poems have the power of rousing the sympathy of the reader by a loyal adherence to the certainty of nature, and the power of giving the interest of freshness by altering the colors of imagination.

                                                                                                                                                               --- Rochak Agarwal