When the Coldness of Life Learns to Burn: A Reading of ‘Icy Chill on Fire’, a poetry book by Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma
By Sushmindar Jeet Kaur
There are moments when life becomes strangely quiet—the room after someone has left, the night when sleep refuses to come, the face that survives only in memory, the body that suddenly reminds us that time has passed, the city glowing outside a window while loneliness sits beside us in silence. It is from such moments, where warmth and emptiness touch each other that much of the poetry in Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma’s Icy Chill on Fire seems to arise. The book does not merely speak about life; it listens to the tremors beneath it.
First, the title itself strikes us. Its title is an arresting paradox. Ice suggests stillness, absence, mortality and emotional desolation; fire suggests desire, memory, imagination, resistance and the irrepressible pulse of life. Between these two elements, Sharma builds his poetic world. His poetry is one in which grief does not extinguish tenderness, ageing does not entirely silence desire, political disillusionment does not destroy conscience, and loneliness does not extinguish the human need for connection. The coldness is real, but so is the flame.
The collection unfolds in three books, moving from the individual mind to the surrounding social world and finally towards larger questions of human existence. This progression gives the volume a quiet organic coherence. What begins as an intensely personal encounter with memory and loss gradually expands into reflections on relationships, institutions, politics, war, urban life, cultural plurality, mythology, perception and the future of humanity.
The First Book: Memory, Mortality and Love
The first book is deeply inhabited by memory. “She Was Alive” is particularly moving because it remembers the dead through the ordinary gestures of everyday life rather than through grand memorial language. The opening itself carries the ache of an impossible wish:
“I wish you were alive all the time
And not ceased one day to be living by me.”
The beloved lives again in the intimate particulars of existence—in the mirror, the tousled hair, the sandal, the sari, the kitchen, the smile.
This is perhaps the most truthful language of bereavement: we do not always remember the dead by their greatest achievements; often we remember how they entered a room, touched an object, prepared a meal or smiled at us. Memory does not restore the dead, but it keeps their gestures warm.
“Unlived Times” deepens this ache by confronting the strange afterlife of absence. Once mourning rituals end, the empty space remains, and the past begins to glow with painful awareness of all that can no longer happen. “Suffering Is Personal,” invoking Valmiki and the grief of separation, expands private sorrow into a timeless human experience while recognizing that no imagined substitute can replace actual presence.
Death in Dr. Sharma’s poetry is therefore not merely an ending. It alters the texture of time, making yesterday more intimate and tomorrow more fragile.
The ageing body becomes another form of memory. In “Noise Within,” the body’s various parts seem to acquire voices of their own, reminding the speaker of fatigue, limitations and the years inscribed in flesh. Yet Sharma does not write about ageing only in the language of decline. There is humour, self-awareness and, importantly, an enduring desire.
This tension becomes particularly evident in the poems of love. “A Future Day” transforms physical intimacy into a longing to cross the invisible boundary between body and soul. “Involuntary Passion” explores desire in conflict with social propriety, asking what happens when authentic feeling is forced to live beneath the gaze of judgement.
“A Lover’s Apology” is even more self-questioning. Here the poet recognizes how easily love may become entangled with imagination: the beloved can become an image created by longing rather than a fully known person. Love, consequently, is not treated as sentimental certainty. It is an unstable territory where memory, desire, imagination and reality continually negotiate with one another.
The first book also contains a keen awareness of contemporary urban existence. “Ivory-Work” and “Lasting Ambience” explore constricted spaces and impersonal metropolitan rhythms, while “Rich Ways” observes the rituals of the modern shopping mall with an amused but critical eye. The poet’s attention repeatedly moves from an apparently insignificant detail towards a larger reflection. This ability to discover philosophical unease inside ordinary experience is one of the collection’s characteristic strengths.
The Second Book: From Private Wounds to Public Conscience
The second book widens this intimate consciousness into social and political awareness. “Alma Mater” transforms an educational institution into a vessel of collective memory, bringing together generations of teachers, students and public figures. “Naked Memory” and “Hereafter” return to the intimate wound of loss, while “Intrusion” considers the unfinished conversations and unresolved emotions that death leaves behind. But the poet’s gaze now becomes unmistakably civic.
“Praise to Censure” questions how easily political narratives can turn failure into achievement and criticism into applause. “Rise of Man” contrasts political grandeur with the struggles of farmers, traders, the hungry and ordinary citizens. “Daily Grind” examines another danger: the seductive appeal of authoritarian order, where efficiency and discipline can gradually become excuses for silencing dissent.
Dr. Sharma’s political poetry is strongest when it remains rooted in the human being behind the abstraction. This is why “War, You Hear” is so affecting. War is stripped of its grand vocabulary and returned to the bodies and lives that bear its consequences. “The Pretender” exposes politics as theatre—costumes, repetition, spectacle, manufactured conflict and carefully arranged appearances. “Three Wise Men,” through the figures of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, places the great decisions of history alongside the ordinary human beings who must live with their consequences.
“Icy Chill in the Spine,” the poem that most explicitly resonates with the book’s title, carries this anxiety into the realm of national symbols and collective identity. It begins with the image of the lions:
“Four lions stood back-to-back
The ancient third-century image
Serves a nation finding freedom.”
The poem then recalls the qualities associated with national strength—
“Power courage confidence pride”—and the moral purpose of strength:
“To frighten the wrong
To rescue the victims
Its might for the right.”
Here the “icy chill” takes on a broader meaning. It is no longer simply the coldness of personal loss; it becomes the chill one feels when society itself seems to be losing its capacity for empathy and when symbols of collective identity can be emptied of their ethical purpose.
The Third Book: Myth, Mortality and Imagination
The third book is perhaps the most expansive in its imaginative range. Mythology, mortality, dreams, family, art, language, cultural diversity and the nature of perception enter into conversation with one another.
“A Crow and the Rope” begins with an apparently simple encounter but turns towards the instability of perception. “Twice-Removed” places ancient images of war alongside the immediacy of modern technological violence and asks what happens to empathy when suffering is repeatedly encountered on screens. “Hanuman” reimagines mythology as an ethical resource, bringing strength into dialogue with courage, learning, courtesy and compassion. “Echoing Bells,” emerging from an encounter with a graveyard in Grenoble, returns to mortality with a meditative rather than merely mournful tone.
The poems “Dying Notes” and “Book of Life” continue the dialogue between the human life cycle and the larger rhythms of nature and time. In “God’s Variety,” this meditation opens into celebration. India’s languages, costumes, festivals, instruments, dances and artistic traditions become evidence of abundance rather than division.
Family provides another tender counterpoint. “Grandson’s Queries” is particularly warm because a child’s questions awaken an entire ancestral history in the grandfather. Memory here is no longer only a repository of grief; it becomes inheritance, a thread passed quietly from one generation to another.
Dr. Sharma is also deeply interested in the making of poetry itself. “Photo-Shoot: A Poem,” “Inspiration,” and “Recreate” turn toward the creative process and suggest that poetry can emerge from resistance, memory, disturbance, fantasy, and sudden illumination. The poet’s own conception of this process is beautifully condensed in the thought of transforming the “icy chill” into fire—the movement from experience to imagination, from wound to word.
The collection’s urban and social imagination reaches one of its most affecting expressions in “A Life in Metro.” The poem begins with the stark economy of space:
“A six by eight room for a home
To bathe, to cook, wash or sleep.”
Behind the glittering metropolis stands a woman working in several households, paying an enormous rent for a tiny room; her husband, too, labours invisibly, carrying the city’s waste away. The poem’s power lies in its restraint. It does not preach poverty; it allows poverty to reveal itself. The metropolitan dream is shown from the narrow room of those who sustain it.
Likewise, “World Abridged” finds irony in a modern life that appears expansive yet is often reduced to repetitive routines of home, work, errands and consumption. “Silent Upheavals” returns to politics, examining how public memory and political narratives influence collective belief. “Observe” questions whether seeing can ever be entirely neutral, reminding us that perception is already shaped by consciousness.
Perhaps the most distinctive idea running through Icy Chill on Fire is that of the unlived. The poet is fascinated not only by what has happened but by what might have happened; not only by remembered experience but by imagined experience; not only by relationships that existed but by relationships that remained suspended between possibility and reality.
This is why memory and imagination are so inseparable in the collection. Memory preserves what has disappeared, while imagination gives form to what never fully arrived. Between the two, the poet constructs an emotional afterlife. His poems are consequently inhabited by absences: the dead beloved, the distant friend, the unfinished conversation, the unexpressed emotion, the unrealized future, the ageing body, the lost opportunity and the imagined companion.
But absence does not produce silence.
It produces poetry.
Dr. Sharma’s poetry is also distinguished by its ethical restlessness. He cannot remain content with beauty alone. Whenever he encounters beauty, the larger human world eventually enters the frame. The beloved exists alongside the hungry citizen; private loneliness beside political loneliness; domestic memory beside historical memory; the ageing body beside society’s wounded body.
His political poems are therefore not merely topical interventions. At their deepest level they are poems about conscience. They ask what happens when citizens stop questioning, when public memory becomes malleable, when violence becomes normalized and when human beings begin to disappear behind slogans.
Yet humour remains an important counterweight. “Self-Love” and “Every Inch a Gentleman” approach ageing, appearance, food and domestic life with a lightness that prevents the collection from becoming excessively somber. Humour itself is a form of wisdom. A life deeply conscious of mortality must still find room for laughter.
Formally, Dr. Sharma largely chooses free verse, often employing a conversational and reflective syntax. His poems do not depend upon elaborate formal ornament. Their music frequently emerges from the rhythm of thought itself—the movement of a question, a memory, a recollection or a sudden turn in perception.
This gives the collection an unusual intimacy. The poems often seem to speak to an absent beloved, a friend, the self, a political figure, a memory or an imagined reader. We are not simply observing the poet’s thoughts; we are invited to inhabit them.
His lyricism often comes not from decorative language but from the emotional charge he places on ordinary things. A sandal, a sari, an ashtray, an elevator, a child’s question, a cramped room, a face, a graveyard or a crow can suddenly become a doorway into larger questions of existence.
He finds philosophy hiding inside the commonplace.
Then comes “Lasting Wish,” the final poem, where much of the collection’s emotional architecture gathers into one deeply human longing.
The opening is almost painfully candid:
“I am lonelier than loneliness;
I am tired of being alone and want
A young mind to challenge myself.”
These are not the words of a poet who has surrendered to age. They are the words of someone who still hungers for conversation, intellectual companionship, surprise and emotional renewal. The poem then moves from loneliness towards an almost miraculous image of another face:
“A single visual of her face
Descends a lucid miracle.”
Yet his final vision is strikingly free of possessiveness. The imagined relationship need not culminate in conventional domestic fulfilment. It can exist in the realm of imagination, where the unlived may still become emotionally rich:
“Not to live ever together,
But to grow rich with joy
In unlived years of mind.”
That ending gives the entire collection its final emotional light.
The book begins with the memory of someone who is gone and ends with the longing for someone who may never fully arrive. Between those two absences, the poet has placed an entire human world: love and grief, body and time, family and friendship, city and inequality, myth and modernity, democracy and power, war and conscience, dream and reality, memory and imagination.
The deepest achievement of Icy Chill on Fire is therefore not that it resolves these oppositions, but that it allows them to remain beautifully, painfully alive.
The ice does not disappear.
The fire does not conquer it completely.
They exist together—just as sorrow can coexist with gratitude, loneliness with longing, age with desire, memory with hope.
And perhaps that is what poetry does at its most human. It cannot bring back the vanished hand, stop the ageing body, silence the machinery of war or repair every broken relationship. But it can place a little warmth around what hurts. It can name what we have been unable to say. It can keep a face alive in the chamber of memory. It can make a lonely heart feel, for a moment, less alone.
Icy Chill on Fire is, at its deepest level, a book about that fragile persistence of feeling.
Its fire is not loud.
It is the quiet fire that remains.
About the Poet
Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma, born in 1952, has served in Himachal Pradesh Education Department in various teaching and administrative capacities till he retired as Principal of Government College, Dharamshala. Dr. Sharma is a bilingual poet, translator and author. His publications include 15 books of English poetry, two anthologies of Hindi poems, Another Gandhi, a monograph on a freedom fighter and A Three- Step Journey, an English translation of Zahid’s Urdu poems.
Read: My Native Land
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Sushmindar Jeet Kaur is an academic, a poet, storyteller, translator, editor, and Associate Professor of English at GGN Khalsa College, Ludhiana. She is the author of three poetry collections—Voices From Within, The Tapestry of Heartstrings, and A Journey Towards LIGHT—and has edited seventeen books. Her poems have been anthologized over a hundred times. Her translations include The Blue Potter, Why Are You Sad?, and Sikh Soldiers in Italy. The Blue Potter, her translation of Ajeet Cour’s work, has been shortlisted for the VOW Book Awards. She also serves as Associate Editor of “Literary Voice”, “Matru Akshar”, and the “Literary Journal of Aesthetics”. Her literary and scholarly work spans poetry, translation, editing, and Indian literature.
