Arcadian Hymns

In an increasingly disenchanted world where life is lived in virtual spaces, the poetic voice of G Keerthana Prasanna echoes not as a mere whisper of nostalgia but as an ecological re-centring of the self: a metaphysical return to the woods, to dawn, to rain, to the quiet breath of the leaf and the lamb, to what Keats would have called "the poetry of earth." This is no escapism. It is a form of resistance.

The author finds joy and peace in the most ordinary and familiar things around us. Hope is the lesson one can learn from flora and fauna – that is what the author believes. The poems are not mere figments of imagination but an outcome of her keen observation. We set out on a journey to the woods and return as men.

To read Arcadian Hymns is to be reminded, like Wordsworth, that "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." But unlike the pantheistic serenity of the Romantics, Keerthana's poetics is dialogic: the self does not merely observe nature; it communes with it, is absorbed by it, speaks through it. 

For the literary theorist, Arcadian Hymns traverses Romantic inwardness, Modernist fragmentation, and Postmodern play, all enfolded within a profound ecological consciousness. "There is nothing outside the text," Derrida reminds us, but Keerthana's poems suggest that perhaps everything is text, and nature is its most ancient grammar.

In an era of linguistic, biological, and ethical extinction, these verses do not simply lament the loss or escape the real. They listen, they cradle, they resurrect. They teach us, once again, the beauty and power of being with flora and fauna.