Just One Goodbye: Poems from the Heart by Balroop SinghMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Balroop Singh’s collection of poems about the loss of her husband is unremitting in its poignancy for the first dozen or so poems. For about twenty pages I was reduced to tears with so many beautifully expressed feelings in so many verses. You are so aware of Balroop’s need to say goodbye to him after her unexpected loss. The melancholy is dripping off each of those pages, maybe too cloying at times, but when she finds strength in her muse in the second half of the collection we can try to understand the solace from her pain that she sometimes finds there. In fact in the poem, “Learning to Live Without You” Singh realises that her muse will kick her “out of her mourning!” And she begins to recognise that her muse is her “prized protector.”
From other collections of her poems I was aware of Balroop Singh’s love of nature and in the poem here, “A Reverie,” I was not surprised to read that when she sought freedom from the gloom of grief, she found light and sweetness and beauty once more in flowers, butterflies; and she borrowed “light from fireflies/ To ignite my will to live/ To be as spontaneous as ever… To soothe my grieving heart.”
The explanation of her journey through this is shown by so many verses, from lines like, “Shocked beyond words,” and “Hope flew away with you,” to some of those in the poem titled “Nostalgia” when she finds precious uplifting memories. There are words here that help to remind her to carry on with life as best she can. Using her memories of her lost husband she says:
“Your smiles shine around me
Calling upon me to be myself.”
The later poems give a small but important break from Balroop’s grief when she recalls fond times with her soulmate, through winter snows and nature walks around their home:
“I am swept off by the north wind,
Grappling to find a foothold,
Wishing you could hold me
Just for a while.”
This is a lovely, but heart-breaking collection, and worth all the empathy one can find.
