🪻Book Review🪻

 Compassion's colour is a Jar of clay 

full of His life.

The Colour of Forgiveness is 

a broken Body pouring out 

Redemption: a Live transaction....

Rayla Noel’s Polished Arrow is a lyrical plunge into psychological and spiritual realms, a work of poetry that reads like mysticism filtered through personal anguish and revelation. At its heart is Ema, a protagonist who is both seeker and cipher, haunted by abandonment and led by a spectral visitor, Seribud—an enigmatic guide whose riddling questions function as both torment and transformation.

Noel’s poetry resists linearity, embracing instead a spiraling structure that mirrors Ema’s inner descent and ascent. The phrase “a minute is a millennium” encapsulates the book’s central tension: time distorts in pain, and healing stretches beyond language. There is a metaphysical surrealism at play—echoe’s of Dante's  descent into the Inferno, with Seribud as a kind of the branch figure, but with more intrigue and intimacy.

Ema’s confrontation with “Skull Hill” and her journey through “hell and back” serve not only as metaphorical trials but as narrative scaffolds for Noel’s deeper poetic inquiry: What is identity when it is born in absence? Why does language—especially reverse spellings—hold such charged significance? These elements cleverly foreground the power of interpretation, as if Ema is constantly decoding the world and herself through poetic inversion.

The imagery—"vertical acres" of scars, a dissolved iceberg of pain—reveals Noel’s unique voice: raw, imagistic, and spiritually charged. The final sections, where healing is depicted through the “poetry of Healing,” suggest a redemptive arc not through resolution, but through endurance and artistic expression.

Polished Arrow is not an easy read, nor is it meant to be. It is demanding, rich in symbolism, and profoundly introspective. 

For readers attuned to poetry that delves into metaphysical and existential terrain - while embracing experimental language and non-linear narrative - Rayla Noel offers a haunting, ultimately catharatic experience. Ema's journey speaks to anyone who has wandered through their own private underworld and emerged changed, scarred, and somehow more whole.

Must read♥️♥️