The Flame Will Always Burn - Selected Poems

The Flame Will Always Burn is a collection of very raw, heartfelt poems written in free verse that chronicles one young woman's traumatic disappointment in love. Given the range and detail in which the trauma is recounted, she might well stand for every woman in such a predicament. The poems are written at a white hot heat, employing no niceties or euphemisms. The honesty and anguish of extreme disillusionment are not papered over and the writer is true to her raging feelings, resorting to none of the more acceptable attractive phraseology that usually tempers such poems. Her hurt and suppurating wounded soul are laid bare for all to see in sordid detail. The reader watches transfixed as she vividly delineates the course of her initial shock at the sudden change in her loved one's affections, the pathos of her helplessness to win him back, and the rancorous ungovernable emotions she experiences subsequently, which veer from tender to stridently vengeful and frightening. At several junctures her psychic wounds push to the surface and the poet renders these overwhelming sensations lucidly and without shame. The range of her feelings as a result of this seismic rejection in her life is at times truly hair-raising and the reader at times fears for her welfare. These are common human emotions that attend a devastating disappointment in love, but rarely are they found on the page in full public view. More often they are stifled, swallowed, and repressed, for the average woman rarely has the nerve to lay bare for all to see. There is no decorum in these pages, only the unfiltered psychological truth of the confusion, pain, rage and heartbreak that follows on the heels of a catastrophic disappointment in young romantic love. The poems are not easy reading given their intense honesty about what this young woman experienced. If there is redemption and solace to be found in these poems it is in the poet's ability to record every iota of an all-too-common anguish in wrenching detail for all the world to see. This indeed is writing as therapy for an individual, but its brashness and truth seem to surmount mere journaling as an outlet for personal psychological relief. The poems as a group stand as a startling unforgettable testimony to an unavoidable rite of human passage, harder on some than others, but real and life changing nonetheless. Fiza Pathan displays a unique compassion and deep understanding of the travails all such individuals face when dealing with this sort of cataclysmic upheaval in one's personal life and the extreme difficulty involved in surviving it.