Colours Of Life: Collection of Poems - Sumita Datta

An Invitation to Quiet Reading

There are some books that arrive in your life not like thunder, but like an old song playing softly in the next room. You don't rush to them. You don't need to. They wait. And when you're finally ready to listen, they speak in a voice that feels achingly familiar. Colours of Life by Sumita Datta is one of those books.

This collection doesn’t try to impress. It doesn’t dress up emotion in heavy metaphor or dramatic flourishes. What it does instead is far more delicate, it offers observation, memory, glimpses. It leans into the quiet weight of lived experience and lets the reader walk beside it at an easy pace. There’s no urgency in these poems, just presence.

What makes the writing so gently effective is its trust in small things. The kind of details that often slip through in everyday life. A curtain fluttering in an afternoon breeze. A particular way someone used to laugh. A half-finished sentence left behind years ago, still resounding somewhere in the back of the mind.

These are not grand moments, but in the hands of the poet, they become worthy of attention. And maybe that’s the real gift of this collection, it teaches you how to pay attention again.

The Poetry of Attention

You don’t need to be a lifelong poetry lover to step into this book. The language never alienates. In fact, it does the opposite, it brings you in. With clarity, with warmth, and often with the kind of simplicity that feels like truth. There’s no need to decode anything. These poems don’t hide behind cleverness. They unfold with the openness of someone who has nothing to prove, only something to share.

The poems carry with them a sense of motion; not just physical, but emotional, as if tracing footsteps both outward and inward. You feel the sense of movement, of a woman who has carried parts of many cities, many years, many roles inside her. But the journey here isn’t about the places. It’s about the person returning home to herself over and over again. Through distance. Through time. Through all the transformations that happen when no one’s looking.

And while there are certainly moments of nostalgia in the collection, they are not sugary or sentimental. The poet looks back without turning away from what was difficult, what was unspoken, what was lost. There’s a kind of honesty here that only comes from someone who’s learned how to hold both light and shadow without needing to label either as good or bad. It’s simply life, in all its colour.

A Companion for Slow Evenings

Each poem lands with its own distinct pulse. One might glow like early morning sun on wet pavement; the next cools the page like dusk settling over a quiet lake. A few pieces surge forward with the momentum of fresh discovery, while others stay, content to trace the slow‑burning embers of a long‑kept memory. Taken together, they shift tone and temperature like changing weather, never predictable, always undeniably alive.

There’s surprising lightness, too. A smile tucked into the end of a stanza. A line that surprises you with its sudden familiarity. These quiet shifts in tone are handled with ease. You can feel that the writer is not trying to be poetic, she’s just being present. And that authenticity creates something rare i.e. trust.

You trust the voice on the page. You trust that what it’s offering is real. And so you keep reading, not to get to the end, but to stay in the moment a little longer.

Colours of Life is not a collection that demands to be read in one sitting. It’s the kind of book you leave by your bedside. The kind you pick up when you want to feel grounded again. When you want to be reminded that poetry doesn't always have to be loud to be powerful. Sometimes, it’s the quiet that rests the longest.

And perhaps that’s what this book leaves behind: an invitation to notice again. To remember that a life doesn’t have to be extraordinary to be full. That in the simple act of paying attention, we rediscover the beauty that was always there, waiting to be seen.

Buy Now