Seeking a moral uprising
Bridgetown poet for peace rails against robotic lives, loss of values
Alnoor Rajan Talwar doesn’t mince words. He’s a poet and those words he doesn’t mince can be right in your face. Time’s a tickin’ and he doesn’t have the luxury of subtlety, hidden meanings, or fancy literary innuendo.
He’s sometimes spiritual, introspective, outspoken, determined, and honest.
With his latest collection of poems the Bridgetown poet from Kenya is saying it’s time to stop and fix the world. Reboot. He’s speaking passionately and insistently the thoughts that many are trying to form.
He describes The Dances of Life – More Unanswered Questions and Unquestioned Answers (all lowercase letters) as poetry for a better world.
“Life takes us on journeys I like to call dances,” Alnoor says in the preface. “As human beings, we are in a constant state of emotional limbo sometimes so completely engrossed in our own lives, that we become oblivious to the hate, death, illness, war, greed and materialism around us.” rowed his focus to the things that matter.
“I am saying that, you know, we’ve really lost all those inherent values of peace and unity and compassion,” he says. “So that’s what this collection was inspired by. I was writing as a rant against that and then it just turned into pieces that actually could be used as inspiration to say ‘ come on, wake up people, we need an uprising of some sort.’”
He describes it as a ‘moral uprising.’
“A moral uprising and then
Although the first poem in the book is The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi (that begins with the line “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”), the rest of the book is pure Alnoor Rajan Tawar, who launches in with his poem Emotional Impotence – The Plight of Our Times.
In it, he talks about the “falsely real pressures of daily living,” hypnotic media messages, the search for refuge or escape, a feeling of discontent, a tolerance – “completely displacing the very essence of our existence.”
It has a spoken word feel to it and is one of those poems that must be read aloud. He uses punctuation sparingly and in several poems plays with font styles and point size to good effect.
His poem Scared looks at things from a different perspective: “I am scared not of you but for you, not of the thorn but for the rose.” Another poem is Cleansing, and there’s one titled The Circles of Hate. But Alnoor doesn’t depress - he challenges. There’s more hope in his work than there is despair. And then there is My Universal Dream, perhaps a summing up that spells out all the good things to hope for – the way that life can be if we all try.
The great thing about Alnoor’s poetry is that you don’t have to be one of those hipsters or academics to pick up The Dances of Life. It’s for everybody. He’s been able to complete your thoughts in many cases – and perhaps those who read it will feel less alone.