Review of Dr.Rita Malhotra's poetry Collection 'Through the Prism of Time' by Award Winning Franco-Swiss Poet Bruno Mercier:
Poetry Book ”Through the prism of
time” by Rita Malhotra
Hawk Press, Reviewed by
Franco-Swiss Poet Bruno Mercier, April 2026
Publication Date: May 10, 2024
Format: Paperback
Print Length: 164 pages
Language: English
LAUNCHED at IIC Delhi April 27 th
2025
at a Book Discussion chaired by
Shri Jaykumar
THE REVIEW:
Considered a particular use of
language, poetry, according to Charles
Baudelaire, is quote; the art of
evoking and suggesting the most vivid sensations,
impressions, and emotions through
the intense union of sounds, rhythms, and
harmonies, especially through
verse. It is rightly said that culture can today be
considered as the set of
distinctive spiritual and material, intellectual and
emotional features that
characterize a society or social group. It encompasses, in
addition to the arts and
literature, lifestyles, fundamental human rights, value
systems, traditions, and beliefs.
In this book the poet alternates
between evoking tragedies that have profoundly
marked the sensitive soul of the
poet and the sweetness of life. She blows hot
and cold, life and death, the
silence of deserted streets and the wail of sirens, the
milky, damp dawn, shrouded in a
thick fog pierced by car headlights, and the
radiant sun, the sparkle of
champagne, dove-white sailboats, feminine desire,
Alice in Wonderland…
If poetry expresses human
aspirations, Rita Malhotra’s poetry confers a new
dimension through the vivid
description of a painting, a universal work of art.
The imaginative act of narrating
and reflecting on the action of a painting
amplifies and deepens its meaning.
This exchange, in this interplay
of the arts, enriches Rita Malhotra’s work with a
symbolic vision of colors and
words. In a few verses, delicately crafted, the poet
translates the painter’s emotions:
a budding love, an expressed desire. She
highlights the eyes as the
periscope of the soul. She places a kiss upon a
jeweler’s case.
The judicious choice of famous
painters and well-known paintings makes this
dialogue accessible to a wide
audience. Similarly, the multimodal perception of
the verses evokes a fusion of
sensations in the reader, like a kind of rapture of
the soul.;
I have selected a few brief
excerpts from Rita’s verse that illustrate the love
fused with the subject of the
painter:
Jewish Bride by Rembrandt
(1665-1669)
…
cherished fusion of the pious
and spiritual
in love’s tender touch…
the intimate moments in the
embrace
of Abraham and Sarah,
of Boaz and Ruth,
of Isaac and Rebekah.
The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, 1909
…
depiction of a passionate
unvoiced
embrace in
the gleaming honest perspective
of
a deep human emotion…
Le Printemps by Pierre-Auguste
Cot, mid-19th
under a canopy of green
colours sing romance
locked in the intense fervour
of a dynamic, seismic love
The Kiss by Francesco Hayez,
mid-19th
secret passionate kiss
the fire in the crusader’s rich
maroon
complements the calm, fresh,
flowing blue…
The Honeysuckle Bower by Peter
Paul Rubens (1609)
…
deluge of hope, of contentment
in two expressive pairs of
equanimous eyes…
Danse à la Campagne by Pierre
Auguste Renoir, 1883
…
her love-stricken smile
effervescence of melody in her
eyes…
The Lovers by Rene Magritte, 1928
…
as thoughts walk to the
rainbow’s end
i see a derset hue on the
shoreline
an erotic fire aflame within.
A Stroll on the Canal at Quimperle
by Henri Le Sidaner (1920-1931)
…
rhythms of soft romance
and whispers of silence
in the shimmering aura of
nascent love…
Rita Malhotra’s cultural fusion is
a process of hybridization that creates new
forms of expression, synonymous
with richness, exchange, and diversity.
How do words and images explore
the same theme, in this case, love? Are there
limits to the connections,
correspondences, or even the fusion between the
works of the poet and the
painters?
Words and images explore the theme
of love by acting as complementary, often
intertwined, mediums that evoke
emotion, with poetry using rhythm and
language to create internal mental
images, while painters use color, light, and
composition to create external
visual experiences. They share a twin language
of the soul, where a poet like
Rita might describe longing through metaphor,
and a painter, such as Klimt
in The Kiss, uses gold leaf to express intimate,
sacred passion.
The exchange between Poetry and
Painting, two modes of expression, allows
us to perceive the extent to which
Rita Malhotra’s poetry has a distinctly
pictorial dimension, and how the
painter’s brush echoes the poet’s pen. Poets
and painters collaborate within
the framework of The Correspondence of
the Arts, defined as ‘The
existence of common characteristics between the
two arts, and of close
relationships between them’. Highlighting a
correspondence of the arts means
identifying these common characteristics.
In the travel poems the poet is
alone with her emotions, facing continents of
legend. The legend of a wealthy
America contrasts sharply with the poverty of
the homeless. What are these
legends compared to the truth she discovers?
Is she disappointed, enthralled?
Is her compassion equal to the tragedy?
Does divinity soften a cruel
winter?
When Rita Malhotra recounts India,
I am captivated by the charm of tantric
poems. The poet awakens the reader
through the harmonization of body, mind,
and energy. I think of the
dairy-wrestling caste, but especially of the pilgrims of
the Ganges, the sacred river.
Benares, a holy city, the
spiritual heart of Hinduism. A city where Europeans
don’t live, where they only pass
through. Generally, upon arrival, at dawn, they
hire a boat and oarsmen and travel
along the left bank of the Ganges to discover
the city. The poem Land of the
Gods is soothing; it narrates ancestral
traditions. Dying in Varanasi
allows one to escape the cycle of rebirth (moksha).
The benevolent spirituality of
Varanasi is followed by the barbarity, the cruelty
of a dehumanizing reality. The
poem ‘disconnect’ relates to the Mumbai attacks,
which sowed the virus of hatred on
the 26 th of November 2008, that left 174
dead and more than 300 injured.
My heart is swept away by the
emotional rollercoaster the poet unleashes within
me. Fortunately, love transforms
lead into gold. The poem Moonshowers
becomes one with the flow of life,
the flow of love. For a moment, we feel safe
from misfortune, while lovebirds
with silver wings reach peaks of rapture.
But this is not to forget that
Rita Malhotra takes on the responsibility to
remember in Shiva’s Silence, the
natural disaster in Uttarakhand in 2013 wherein Kedarnath was devastated on the
night of June 16-17 by landslides and flash floods claimed more than 5,000
lives. She questions Shiva: Why did he let this disaster happen? Why did he
simply remain a spectator? & Why is life so short? Why is death so long? “As if attempting to strike a balance between good
and evil, beauty and ugliness, the poet-tightrope walker offers us, in conclusion
to this Section, a poem about the enchanting Niagara Falls, an
exuberant nature that reconciles
us with life, a generous nature, both powerful
and protective, a music of
entwined twins, a cosmic dance of the god Shiva, a
graceful and tender dance of the
goddess Parvati, a nature that embodies beauty,
joy, and compassion.”
Rita Malhotra’s genius lies in her
ability to transport the reader not merely
through a geographical atlas, but
through the emotional map of each of us. Her
poetry of the event — drama,
natural disaster etc— is an alliance, a loving union
between meaning and the space of
the poem. Within such a horizon, art remains
profoundly plastic, allowing us to
challenge the formless and the foul. The poet
invites us to dance, poised above
the void. She is the craftswoman who imbues
the stone with memory, beyond the
rigid frameworks of tradition. She whispers
the event, unfolding a poetry of
vulnerability, at the threshold of a world of
hope.
© Bruno Mercier, poet, Lausanne,
19.04.2026
Email : brmercier@bluewin.ch
