“Out beyond ideas/ of wrongdoing and rightdoing,/ there is a field./ I’ll meet you there,” so said Jalaluddin Rumi. Barring two or three, all the poems in Whispering Echoes are in search of such a ‘field’ – forests, hills, seas, rivers, farming lands, orchards, and open skies.

Figuratively Whispering Echoes echoes my heart’s deepest love and light, hope and wish, elation and exultation, longing for friendship and sacrifice. It is diametrically opposite to my debut Rugged Terrain in its themes and appeals. Here the land is forever soft, air is cool, grass green, trees dark, hills lovely, skies sea-blue, seas welcoming. There the land is rugged, parched, barren and bleak.

The poems are simple in structure and theme. Some are my response purely to Nature’s undying beauty and serenity. Some are musings on children, the aged, and the farmers. Others are on some intangible aspects of human life – love, friendship, brotherhood, sacrifice and death. It celebrates life in its rosy hues.

I believe true poetry emerges from our deepest delight and anguish. And while Whispering Echoes exults my elation and exhilaration, Rugged Terrain encapsulates my dark and dreary mood. Two volumes are, thus, basically what Blake calls “two contrary states of human soul.”