Songs of Sadness

The book explores the depths of human sorrow in its various shades and layers from a lonely woman's perspective. Failure in relationships, human betrayal, death of loved ones, suffering from injustice and bitter loneliness of old age etc are beautifully depicted through haunting imagery in these poems.

For the poet boundless joy is the default nature of human beings. Sadness is just a manifestation of one's forgetfulness of one's true eternal divine nature. Human beings forget their inner divinity due to attachment to the temporary external world. However physical and mental suffering prepares the human heart for ultimate God communion.

Underneath the terrible frustration of mundane human existence there is an intense yearning for God realisation. Suffering ceases when the object of frustration is shifted from worldly failures to the pangs of separation from God. These poems with underlying spiritual messages provide a penetrating new interpretation of the universal truths contained in scriptures of all world religions - e.g. Veda, Bible, Gita and Quran.

Lalitha Iyer is a pseudonym of Hemangi Sharma, the mystic poet-scholar from Kashmir. The book has been edited by the poet Dr Tapan Kumar Pradhan, who has also written its foreword and introduction.