In Silken Wings, Dr Jane Rajesh, writing under her evocative pen name, Thalir, crafts an anthology that soars on the gossamer threads of love, longing, and transcendence. In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, “The only journey is the one within,” and Thalir invites us on such a journey—into the labyrinthine corridors of memory, the spectral hush of night’s embrace, and the delicate tremors of unspoken yearning.
Thalir’s voice is an essential one in contemporary poetry—at once personal and universal, intimate and boundless. To read Thalir’s poetry is to step into a dreamscape where time collapses and emotions are distilled to their purest essence. There is an ineffable yearning woven through these pages, akin to Keats’s “tender is the night,” a longing that exists both within and beyond the self.
A significant leitmotif in this collection is nature’s omnipresence—trees, stars, the moon, rain, and the wind appear as interlocutors, lovers, and silent witnesses to the human condition. Thalir is equally at home in the intimate realm of desire. The delicate craft of Silken Wings lies not just in its exploration of the grand emotions—love, loss, longing—but in its ability to give voice to the quiet moments, the in-between spaces of existence.
If poetry is, as Wordsworth proclaimed, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” then Silken Wings is a monsoon of emotion—each poem a raindrop reflecting a different hue of the human soul. This collection is an invitation to drift, to float, to surrender to the intoxicating embrace of language and feeling.
"In Silken Wings, Dr Jane Rajesh reconstructs the unrecorded murmur of existence from remembrances of things well past and long lost. These verses do not so much present a world as dismantle one, leaving behind the fried fragments of forlorn dreams, the bereaving residues of forgotten desires, the scent of a presence that was, perhaps, never there. There is a geography of longing in these pages, a cartography of absence. This is not poetry that seeks solace; rather, it tarries at the margins of comfort, speaking softly into the void. It is a sanctuary, a whispered confession, a lover’s sigh caught in the wind. It is also a testament to the enduring power of words, their ability to carry us beyond ourselves, to let us dream, to let us soar." — Prof Manu Mangattu (Foreword)