Islamabad : ‘Kia Zamana Tha’ is a beautiful collection of poetry by Baji Nusrat. She is a loving poet whose poetry touches multiple human roles in life. It is a collection of powerful poems expressing romantic and spiritual love interspersed with beautiful and vivid colours of life. The poems cause the reader to re-evaluate his or her conception of love in all its forms, the lover, the mother, the child, acceptance of self, and love for the creator.
The book explores various forms of love and captures the beauty of love and the freedom that comes with it. In it, love expression is for a person, a group of people, or a place.
The poet explores a wide range of subjects, which include her cultural and family history, and reflects her fascination with music and the discoveries offered by language. The poet does not only focus on romantic love but ventures into other forms of love. Some of these include love expressions to God and to a parent. She has lovely poems about her family members.
‘Kia Zamana Tha’ is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world. It is a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common like sorrow, tenderness, desire, the surprises and impermanence of life, and the hard, dry punch of death.
Her work is full of profound verses. Her use of detail and observation, her sheer ability to mine the emotion out of every word with subtle, powerful strokes makes this collection one for the bedside. I think it will be on my current reading list for a while as it is worth reading.
She is one of the wisest poets I have ever read. Deep, joyous, full of wonder and sorrow all together. While she is not a nature poet, her poems are organic and evoke all that nature is, inside, outside, within, without.
People are living at a time where life is a little ugly around them, or a lot, and immersing in poetry is essential to sustain their souls. So much thought and depth live in each poem. This is a book to keep nearby in days of sorrow and days of waiting.
The book is full of memorable poems about how you can fall out of love and how you feel when left behind. You truly see yourself when you experience pain and loss and wipe away the tears. You feel trapped and seek a space where you can be yourself.
It offers a close-up look at a person’s deep thoughts about love and life. It is about losing and gaining human links. The poems stand out because they reflect how we feel about love and loss, about the deep connections that bind us.