Sri Chinmoy Poetry Festival

“The title The Garden of Love-Light encapsulates what lies within – a warm, refreshing poetic space that has the resplendence of a rainbow, replete with imagery and a cadence that stays with the reader like a deeply moving raga, long after its rendition. The collection is a musician’s inspiration, a painter’s reverie, a philosopher’s illumination and a devotee’s restorative delight. Its bilingual presentation, with its East-West bridge-building expansiveness, is imbued with a love of humanity and a universalism that make the reader feel Sri Chinmoy’s presence as a truly sustaining force.”

Professor Bashabi Fraser, Director, Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies, Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland

“Premaloker Kanan (The Garden of Love-Light) is an early collection of poem-songs by the great seer-poet Sri Chinmoy, and that makes the scale of its achievement all the more remarkable. This new edition brings together for the first time Sri Chinmoy’s original Bengali verses and his own English translations, and the effect is thrilling. Not mere transliterations, the English versions have a quality and character all of their own, and stand alone as poems in their own right, reimagined, made new. Like all of Sri Chinmoy’s subsequent work (and his poetic output was vast) they are instructional, uplifting, inspiring – mantric in their power. Imbued with a rare lyricism and innate musicality, they speak to the searching mind and the crying heart. “

Professor Alan Spence, Professor Emeritus, School of Language and Literature, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, The Edinburgh Makar/Poet Laureate of the City of Edinburgh

In these days of endless bad news, with the “cord of wild restlessness” wrapping ’round us daily, it is easy to feel deeply hungry for “infinity’s lustre” – calming, abiding images and invocations to hearten our spirits. No matter how religious one is or is not, the essential luminosity of Sri Chinmoy’s spirit and fervor feels compelling, refreshing and profoundly hopeful. His poems are always attentive to a deeper call, awakening and stirring his readers. They help us be more silent “in the grove (of our minds)” as well as better witnesses with our own words.

Naomi Shihab Nye, Poet, novelist and songwriter

Kusumita P. Pederson, Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, St. Francis College, New York

The publication of this collection of Sri Chinmoy’s early poems is an occasion for rejoicing, especially in this dual-language edition. His Bengali lyrics, with his own translations into English, are an essential part of his extensive body of work. These are mystical poems of unique depth and power. I first encountered them more than forty years ago, and they remain ever new and fresh in their capacity to move and illumine the reader.