‘Trailing the Transient Silhouettes of Meaning’ in Sushmindar Jeet Kaur’s A Journey Towards Light

Abstract

This review critically examines A Journey Towards Light by Sushmindar Jeet Kaur as a significant contribution to contemporary Indian English poetry. The collection of approximately forty poems interweaves spiritual inquiry, feminist assertion, and lyrical introspection, positioning itself at the intersection of Eastern devotional traditions and Western poetic lineages. Through recurring motifs of light, journey, silence, and selfhood, Kaur constructs a coherent poetic architecture that traces a movement from existential uncertainty to self-realization. The review situates the poems in dialogue with writers such as John Donne, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and T. S. Eliot, while also engaging Sikh mystical thought and feminist discourse. Emphasizing the poet’s use of free verse, symbolic binaries, and a multi-voiced lyrical “I,” the review argues that the volume achieves thematic unity through repetition and narrative progression. Ultimately, the collection emerges as a meditative poetic journey that reconciles tradition and modernity, individual and cosmos, and thereby affirms poetry’s enduring role as a vehicle of spiritual and cultural illumination.