Angel Tears: An unforgettable journey through love lost

Repost, original post May 28th, 2020

Angel Tears by Ritwik Dhandhi is a beautiful compilation of poems articulating the beautiful heart-wrenching timeline of falling in love and having your heart-broken. It is my honour to do an analysis and review of this moving book of #InstaPoetry that has touched my heart. Angel Tears explores the story of star-crossed lovers, interconnecting poems from each stage of heartbreak to show how what once reminds you of love and happiness becomes tainted with the taste of loss until you are able to move on.

Love commences the book, starting with Rainstorm and Chamomile, both with ethereal, peaceful settings. Chamomile reads almost as if you are sitting in the room witnessing something so intimate and exquisite that you have to look away for a moment. In Rainstorm, Dhandhi describes the lover as “made of stone” to signify the walls he built up to save himself from falling in love. The next lines show how the protagonist changes as their significant other impacts their life – from being stone to human. It reminds me of a quote from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” I think it was a great decision to start the book off with the succinct and concise Rainstorm because it is much like falling in love for some people – short, sweet, and suddenly.

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” – John Green, The Fault in Our stars

Perhaps the two most important poems that tie the book together are Heavens Fall, Angel Tears and Broken Halo. Heavens Fall, like Chamomile, brings an air of intimacy to the poem that makes the reader feel like they’re intruding on a display of passionate love. Dhandhi pleads for the angels to come through, that the heavens fall on the two of them. Akin to Firehouse’s You Are My Religion and Dierks Bentley, Dhandhi ranks the lovers on a pedestal of power and mammoth as religion. The poem Angel Tears is the commencement of the pain the lover feels once separated from their significant other, a true testament to Dhandhi’s excellent writing to break our hearts like his. Broken Halo pits Dhandhi’s love interest as a “demonic stranger” and a fallen angel, stripped of its wings. Has the stranger been kicked out of the protagonist’s heaven?

Connections are weaved through the book within each chapter, once crucial and touching repeated word of “strangers.” In the fourth poem Strangers, the protagonist wants to learn about and know the love interest and describes the way they interact with one another. Then, the first poem in Heartbreak, Broken Halo, shifts the perspective of the angel lover to a stranger again. Strangers Reprise starkly references the idea of strangers when Dhandhi reiterates the confusion, loss and pain that comes with breakups. “Rose-coloured glasses” signify the honeymoon period of the relationship that they were in, that circumvented the protagonist to see through their lover’s lies. In BoJack Horseman, Wanda expresses a similar sentiment, “You know, it’s funny; when you look at someone through rose-coloured glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.” In Beautiful Strangers, Dhandhi paints what he perceives to be his last words on Judgement Day and where he will go, all for the innocent crime of wanting to love and be loved. The symbol of strangers is a powerful one when describing lost lovers as it exemplifies the cutting of ties and how you no longer know one another. Dhandhi wields this tool expertly to show the reader that the love we once heard of at the beginning of the book and we were rooting for, neither the protagonist nor we know them anymore.

“You know, it’s funny; when you look at someone through rose-coloured glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.” – Wanda, BoJack Horseman

Healing gives the reader hope that the protagonist, who was spiralling into a depression and darkness, will find love in another and himself again. The repeated imagery of a blue bedroom once signified loss, nostalgia, confusion and drowning, now leaves a hope that there will be another to keep the protagonist warm when he feeling alone, as in Shivering. The polarity of darkness and light exemplifies to the reader that the protagonist is climbing out of an abyss of darkness and soon there will be brighter better days, now that he knows what he wants in a relationship. Dhandhi prays that you will breathe, heal and be okay, and wants you to know that he is here. Healing concludes the book with a note of finality on a sombre mood of hope, healing, amendments, accepting truths and knowing how much you’re worth, and anticipation that he will be back soon.

Conclusively, Angel Tears takes the reader on a journey through time, where we see the past, present and future of a relationship that has ended, and the strangers turned to lovers turned to strangers again. Dhandhi’s poetry is straightforward, short, concise and direct so the reader can immediately feel the impact of the jarring emotions the protagonist feels. The three chapters Love, Heartbreak and Healing are weaved together with complex, deep symbols hidden in the poems to show the range of feelings one experiences and develops as love grows and weans. This poetry book is definitely one of the greats that I have read for this year and I cannot wait to see what more stories and tales Dhandhi has to show us.