A Review of A Verdant Heart
By Prithvijeet Sinha
Published by Bookleaf Publishing, 2025
ISBN: 978-9372137330 (Paperback)
Price: 213 INR
Language: English, pp. 76
-Amrita Sharma
A Verdant Heart is the debut poetry collection by the Lucknow based poet Prithvijeet Sinha, also the ‘avadh boy’ penning the prolific pieces at https://anawadhboyspanorama.wordpress.com/ . A collection of vividly crafted and densely expressive poems, the collection offers an intricately woven threads of sounds and images from the cultural calm of Lucknow streets.
From the beginning verses to the concluding ones, the poems melt and merge across themes that stir human existence. They spring across emotions that rise within to social contexts that threaten the calm. Bringing life to Lucknow panoramas, the poems offer an engaging and provoking reading experience. As for example, in the poem “An Evening”, Sinha writes:
The duskhas run away from dark orphanages.
Families of 'saal' cover the forest with abundance just like the river's bouyant currents guide the Grand Boatahead.
Urging readers to reflect and stir, the poems blend beauty with pathos, memory with hope, as well as life with struggle. A strikingly remarkable example of this blend appears in the following poem “Branches” where he writes:
The branches were taut as an arrow or directly ploughing the air with arms shaped like pitchforks.
They could never envision the violence of our world. In a farm next to this foliage tailored by someone with superb skills, bearing a village's heartland and the phonetics of air,were a farmer and his cows. They were singing, without words, the last notes of an agrarian song.
With all its verses composed in Lucknow, this short yet winsome collection presents a remarkably beautiful love letter, appearing both written for and from the city breeze. A tribute to the tranquil greens and humming imagery of Lucknow, the poems also bring across a poetic persona that surfaces through the pages. Offering a reading experience that is both calming, yet provocative, this book promises a new flavor to your poetic palate as well as a verdantly soulful addition to your bookshelf.
About the Reviewer
Amrita Sharma is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, India. She is a Ph.D. in English from the University of Lucknow and has been a Fulbright Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Languages and Cultures, University of Notre Dame, USA. Her works have previously been published in several national and international journals. She is the author of the monograph From Experimental Trends to Creative Legacies: Language Poetry and its American Avant-Garde Aesthetics, published by Routledge, 2026. Her first collection of poems is titled The Skies: Poems and has been published as a part of ‘The Hawakal Young Poets Series 2022.’ Email: sharma.amrita92@gmail.com
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