Divan of Shah | Shah Asad Rizvi

Title: Divan of Shah
Author: Shah Asad Rizvi



This could have been read in one sitting, but I had to put it down for a while, because I found it confusing, and since I've been sick, I wasn't able to take it in all at once. That is neither a good nor a bad thing.

Shah Asad Rizvi has arranged this book very beautifully, starting with the love of a mother and continuing into falling in love with another person, getting into a passionate relationship with that person, the relationship ending, the grief and coming to terms with the demise of the relationship, and then losing oneself in dance. I really liked the arrangement of the book. I thought it was very well done.

He obviously has a very poetic mind, and I appreciate the way he views things. I think this book needed a really good editor before publication, because there are certain grammatical things that really need to be fixed. He goes between "thee" and "thy" to "you" and "your" within the same poem and uses the incorrect possessive forms of things, etc. As a reader and a writer, that is really distracting to me. There are a lot of incomplete thoughts, too, which was also very distracting to read.

I was also confused by the "Quote" thing that he does. He starts his book off with a "Quote," and then there is a "Quote" between each poem. I'm not sure what he's trying to do there, and there is no explanation. It doesn't attribute the "Quote" to anyone, so is he quoting himself? Are these just poems that are all named "Quote"? I don't know what he was trying to do there, but whatever it was, it didn't really work.

Rizvi has a lot of potential to become a great poet, and I look forward to seeing what he does in future endeavors. This was a good attempt, but it just didn't quite work for me. I give it three out of five stars.

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READING PROGRESS:
No Tomorrow by Luke Jennings: 66%
Rose Madder by Stephen King: 35%
Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey: 57%
Late Last Night by Lilian Darcy: NOW STARTING

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