The poems of Ravi Shankar Etteth beckon the reader to a strange luminous world that stays tantalizingly out of reach. The experience is, as he says in his introduction, like waking from a dream and thinking you were really there, and longing to go back to that world. Except that you can never revisit the land of your dreams.

From the quotidian to the ineffable sadness of whiling ‘springtime away on false lights, deep wine and fickle friends’; a lament for autumn with its falling flowers; memories of things that have never happened; and a startling take on Michelangelo’s ‘Creation’, there is little that escapes the poet’s vision. With its biting wit and a singular understanding of the ephemeral nature of life’s experiences, beautifully illustrated by the author, Rhapsody Road is a collection that you will find yourself dipping into time and again.

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