The Elements of Beauty

A Poetry Collection

Poetry - General
511 Pages
Reviewed on 11/12/2024
Buy on Amazon

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Author Biography

Vikas Parihar lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He graduated with a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, specializing in System Design, Power Systems, and Control Systems from California State University, Los Angeles. He studied Management, Leadership, and Negotiation at Harvard Business School and the MIT Sloan School of Management in Massachusetts. He is the author of short stories, poems, songs, novellas, and novels.

He started writing at the age of 14. His first poem was an existential observation of his surroundings and an inquiry about the absolute. Many of the poems included in his collections were written over the last two decades.

His published works include nine poetry collections: "The Elements of Beauty," "The Beautiful Memories," "A Love Letter to Time," "Poems for Young Eyes and Curious Minds," "A River in My Heart," "The Poems and the Poet," "Time," "The Poems of Everyday," and "The Absolute, the Cause of All Causes: Lord Krishna, His Devotees, and His Abode," as well as a short story collection, "The Modern Man." His works have received positive reviews and admiration from Readers' Favorite, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly's BookLife.

His books are available in twelve countries on Amazon websites, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Japan, Canada, and Australia. His books are also sold in the United Kingdom by Waterstones Booksellers.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Carol Thompson for Readers' Favorite

The Elements of Beauty by Vikas Parihar is a resonant collection that explores nature, existence, love, and self-reflection through a thoughtful fusion of free verse, lyrical, and philosophical styles. Parihar’s poetry encapsulates life’s delicate and grand moments, bridging personal introspection with universal musings. With vivid imagery and a soothing rhythm, each poem immerses readers in scenes that range from the simple beauty of a dewdrop to the majestic embrace of the cosmos, fostering a profound connection with the natural world and inner self. The collection’s structure allows readers to journey through various aspects of beauty and being, inviting them to pause and reflect on their experiences and perceptions.

Vikas Parihar’s style is deeply reflective, capturing fleeting moments with precision and grace. The poems’ structure often employs a lyrical cadence that mirrors the tranquility of natural scenes, drawing readers into quiet contemplation. Parihar’s ability to weave themes of unity and solitude, mainly through motifs like the moonlight, rivers, and mountains, reflects his nuanced understanding of the human soul’s search for meaning. Some poems use symbolism, as in “A Dew Drop Became Many,” to emphasize themes of interconnectedness. Others take on a philosophical tone, examining the essence of life, love, and the passage of time. The Elements of Beauty offers a refreshing and reflective read for readers seeking a collection that balances beauty with introspection. Parihar’s words guide us gently, reminding us of our relationship with nature and the world and encouraging an appreciation for life’s inherent poetry. Anyone who loves poetry will want to add this book to their library.

Jacob Smith

What a wonderful poetry collection! Each poem is a true gem.

Lilian Miller

The Elements of Beauty is a mesmerizing poetry collection that captures the essence of life, love, and existence in its rawest and most profound forms. Each poem is a journey—sometimes gentle, sometimes turbulent—into the depths of human emotion, philosophy, and the wonders of the universe. The collection seamlessly weaves together reflections on nature, time, identity, and the struggles of the soul, offering a poetic experience that is both intimate and universal.

The poet’s ability to evoke vivid imagery through words is remarkable. Whether painting a serene morning with "The Beauty of Sunrise," contemplating cosmic mysteries in "The Galaxies," or exploring the weight of existence in "The Burden of The Universe," every piece resonates with depth and contemplation. The language is both elegant and evocative, inviting the reader to pause, reflect, and lose themselves in the beauty of the written word.

Beyond aesthetics, The Elements of Beauty also challenges the reader to think deeply about life’s dualities—the known and the unknown, joy and sorrow, love and loss. It is a collection that lingers in the heart and mind long after the last page is turned, a true testament to the power of poetry.

David Jones

The Elements of Beauty is a breathtaking poetry collection that explores life, love, and existence with profound depth. Each poem is a masterful blend of philosophy, nature, and emotion, leaving a lasting impact. The vivid imagery and thoughtful reflections make this collection a timeless journey through beauty and introspection.

Max Niles

The Elements of Beauty is a poetic masterpiece that captures the essence of life’s wonders and mysteries. Each poem flows like a river of emotions, weaving together nature, love, time, and existence. It is a collection that speaks to the soul, leaving a trail of beauty long after the final verse.

Vivan Lee

The Elements of Beauty is a symphony of words, a tapestry woven with emotion, wisdom, and wonder. Each poem feels like a whispered secret from the universe, inviting the reader to pause, reflect, and marvel. It is a luminous journey through the depths of existence, leaving an unforgettable imprint on the soul.

Kyle James

The Elements of Beauty is a mesmerizing collection that transcends mere words, inviting the reader into a world where poetry breathes, sings, and contemplates the essence of existence. Each poem is a delicate balance of thought and emotion, capturing the fleeting beauty of life while pondering its deeper mysteries.

Vikas Parihar masterfully weaves imagery, philosophy, and human experience into verses that resonate long after they are read. Whether exploring the cosmic grandeur of The Galaxies, the quiet elegance of A Dew Drop Became Many, or the existential reflections of The Burden of The Universe, this collection illuminates both the seen and the unseen aspects of life.

The language is graceful, the emotions raw yet refined, and the themes universal—touching upon love, nature, time, and the intricate dualities of being. The Elements of Beauty is not just a book of poems; it is an immersive experience, a journey into the heart of what it means to exist, to feel, and to wonder. A truly remarkable collection that lingers in the mind and soul, reminding us of the profound beauty in all things.

Max Reed

The Elements of Beauty is a soul-stirring collection that captures the essence of life, love, and existence with breathtaking depth and lyrical grace.

Peter ( UK )

This is one of the most beautiful poetry collections I have ever read.

Michael ( Germany )

The Elements of Beauty is a rich, soulful collection that captures fleeting moments and eternal truths with remarkable sensitivity. Each poem feels like a quiet meditation—on nature, love, time, and the self. The poet’s voice is introspective yet expansive, guiding readers into deeper awareness. This is a book to return to often, discovering something new each time.

Haruto ( Japan)

I love this collection; it's exceptionally original.

Sakura Tanaka ( Japan)

I'm completely captivated by this collection; its originality is both refreshing and awe-inspiring.

Mita Sharma

I’m in love with this collection—its innovative spirit and exceptional originality make it a true masterpiece.

Lilac

This collection stands out with its remarkable uniqueness, and I find it utterly enchanting.

Justin Cameron ( Canada )

The Elements of Beauty is not merely a poetry collection—it is a symphony of perception, a meditation in verse, and a mirror reflecting the countless nuances of being. Rarely does a body of work arrive that touches the infinite while being so rooted in the particular. This collection moves like time itself—quiet, certain, intimate—guiding readers through winding paths of dew-draped mornings, weathered sidewalks, philosophical musings, and deeply felt emotional truths. Every page resonates with the kind of honesty that can only come from a soul in conversation with both the self and the universe.

Each poem is like a breath drawn slowly; some inhale the scent of lilacs, others exhale the weight of longing, loss, or wonder. The poet does not seek to impress with ornament but instead uncovers beauty already present—often hidden in overlooked corners: a destroyed violin, a cloud-strewn sky, the melancholy of marigolds, the dignity of silence. One can feel the author’s reverence for not just life, but for living—for the tension between known and unknown, for the stretch of memory and the gravity of time.

This is a book where metaphysics meets the mundane, where cosmic riddles hum beneath sidewalk cracks, and where the reader is constantly invited into stillness, awareness, and inquiry. With unflinching vulnerability, the poet names pain, confusion, and solitude without romanticizing them, yet always remains sensitive to their potential for transformation. This delicate balance—between the philosophical and the emotional, the abstract and the tangible—is what makes The Elements of Beauty feel at once timeless and deeply contemporary.

It is not just a collection to be read; it is to be experienced, carried, and returned to—as one returns to a lake, a forest trail, or a conversation that changed something quietly, but forever. With over 160 poems, it becomes a world of its own, one in which readers do not simply admire beauty—they recognize it, and through that recognition, perhaps recognize themselves a little more clearly.

In a world often too loud to hear its own poetry, The Elements of Beauty is a necessary hush—profound, tender, and brave in its simplicity. It doesn’t seek applause; it seeks connection. And in that, it succeeds with extraordinary grace.

Michael Reynolds ( UK )

Reading The Elements of Beauty feels like standing before a great, silent mountain—one that has witnessed all seasons, all weathers, all transformations—and being invited not to climb it, but to simply listen to it. This poetry collection is not a spectacle; it is a meditation. It doesn’t demand attention, it earns intimacy. It speaks softly, but it leaves echoes that linger long after the page has turned.

What makes this work extraordinary is not just the range of themes it explores—nature, time, memory, love, decay, truth, silence, identity—but the gentle yet profound way it does so. There is no boastful flourish, no forced cleverness. Instead, there is a purity of observation, a sincerity of voice that suggests the poet has spent more time listening to the world than trying to impress it. That is a rare gift in poetry today.

The poems act like mirrors: quiet, still, and startlingly accurate. They show us our own thoughts before we’ve found the words for them. A violin left abandoned, the hush of a pond, the elegance of a dew drop becoming many, the absurdity of a queue that won’t move—these are not just poetic subjects, but vessels that hold the philosophical weight of being human. There is such humility in this work. Such depth. One does not read these poems and say, “What a brilliant poet.” One reads them and thinks, “Yes. That’s how it feels.”

And this is where The Elements of Beauty transcends being just a collection—it becomes a companion. It travels through emotional terrain without turning away. It doesn't promise comfort, but it offers presence. It doesn’t pretend to solve life’s mysteries, but it dares to ask the right questions and sit with the silence that follows. The poems stretch across existence, from the cosmic to the intimate, the conceptual to the corporeal, and in doing so, they gather us gently into their orbit.

This collection is not just a celebration of beauty—it is an inquiry into it. Not the glossy, symmetrical kind, but the kind that lives in imperfections, in metaphors left incomplete, in leaves that refuse to mature, in conversations never finished. It finds beauty in contradiction, in repetition, in mystery. And somehow, in doing so, it finds us.

The Elements of Beauty is more than a book. It is a sanctuary. It is a sacred archive of noticing—each poem a quiet act of devotion to the world, both as it is and as it could be.

Christian ( USA)

To engage with The Elements of Beauty is to enter a liminal space wherein the metaphysical and the mundane intermingle with seamless grace—where the poetic gesture becomes less a performative utterance and more a contemplative act of ontological excavation. This collection does not merely catalogue aesthetic phenomena; it interrogates the very substratum of perception, disassembling the constructs through which we apprehend what is beautiful, and reconstructing them with a lexicon of stillness, fragmentation, and existential humility.

The poet, whose voice evokes both the clarity of intuition and the abstraction of metaphysical reasoning, acts as an intermediary between fleeting phenomena and enduring truths. Each poem becomes a prism refracting light from multiple philosophical traditions—Stoic restraint, Vedantic wholeness, phenomenological attention—all held delicately in a syntax that resists certainty in favor of inquiry. A leaf that refuses maturation, a violin rendered voiceless by time, or a dewdrop's existential disintegration—such symbols do not serve to ornament the work; they function as epistemological gateways to that which remains ineffable in being.

What elevates this volume beyond mere poetic accomplishment is its commitment to epistemic vulnerability—the willingness to dwell in unknowing, to embrace semantic silence as equally revelatory as articulated truth. In this way, The Elements of Beauty transcends the aesthetic, becoming a cartography of the soul’s most intimate thresholds. It is, at once, an elegy to transience and an invocation of the eternal—a work that neither flinches from decay nor fetishizes wonder, but instead finds in their oscillation a rare and radical poise.

This is not merely a book to be read; it is a phenomenological encounter to be inhabited slowly, reverently, and with the full weight of one's intellectual and emotional attention. In a literary landscape often cluttered with the ornamental and the overwrought, The Elements of Beauty emerges as a sacred geometry of thought and feeling—an architecture built from nuance, silence, and the unfathomable elegance of simply being.

Giovanni ( Italy)

The Elements of Beauty is a tender and profound meditation on existence, capturing the quiet grace of life’s fleeting moments. Each poem lingers like a whispered truth, timeless and deeply human.

Adam Smith

In The Elements of Beauty, Vikas Parihar presents a poetic landscape that is both tenderly intimate and philosophically expansive. This extraordinary collection is not merely an homage to beauty in its myriad forms, but a reflection on how beauty intersects with memory, mortality, perception, nature, and the infinite search for meaning. Through over 160 poems, Parihar crafts a universe where even the smallest detail—a dew drop, a leaf, a ripple—holds immense existential weight.

What makes this work singular is its profound ability to balance simplicity with depth. Parihar writes with a lucid clarity that welcomes every reader, yet embedded within each verse are layers of metaphysical rumination, emotional vulnerability, and spiritual resonance. His style is fluid and confident, adapting seamlessly to the subject at hand—sometimes lyrical and romantic, sometimes stark and meditative, sometimes filled with longing, and often grounded in the quiet revelations of everyday life.

The poems are rooted in vivid imagery. From the serene solitude of a mist-covered countryside trail to the haunting melancholy of a destroyed violin, the physical world becomes a mirror to the internal. Time and again, Parihar reminds us that the seemingly ordinary—whether it’s a marigold in bloom, a backyard in West Michigan, or a cup of coffee—carries the seeds of universal truths. Each poem becomes a vessel through which the reader may glimpse their own unspoken emotions, lost memories, and silent yearnings.

What sets The Elements of Beauty apart is also its courageous honesty. The poet does not shy away from exploring pain, disillusionment, or the haunting weight of existential doubt. Yet, the work does not wallow—it observes. It listens. It records the aching beauty of existence in all its contradictory forms: joy and despair, stillness and chaos, knowing and unknowing.

Equally admirable is Parihar’s intellectual rigor. Poems such as E = mc²: The Dance of Energy and Matter and The Theory of Relativity demonstrate his ability to blend scientific insight with poetic intuition, creating a harmonious dialogue between reason and reverie. He seamlessly weaves philosophy, cosmology, and emotional truth into a single poetic thread, challenging the reader to contemplate the seen and unseen, the known and the unknowable.

The Elements of Beauty is a book to be lived with, returned to, and slowly absorbed. Each visit offers something new: a hidden metaphor, a deeper interpretation, or simply a sense of peace. It is a collection that urges us to pay attention—not just to the world around us, but to the silent world within us.

In a time where noise overwhelms and distractions abound, Parihar offers a rare sanctuary: a meditative, poetic space where readers can reconnect with awe, gratitude, and the delicate strength of being human. The Elements of Beauty is not just a book—it is an experience, an offering, and a gift.

Krishna Das

The Elements of Beauty is a breathtaking journey through the intricate tapestries of life, time, and nature.
Each poem feels like a whisper from the universe, reminding me of the sacredness in small things.
Vikas Parihar has a gift for turning ordinary moments into extraordinary reflections.
The collection is a symphony of subtle emotions—tender, fierce, and deeply introspective.
There is a quiet spirituality in his words, one that nourishes without preaching.
I found myself pausing after every few poems, not from fatigue but from awe.
He invites the reader to slow down, to observe, and most importantly, to feel.
From a leaf’s refusal to mature to the echo of a broken violin, each metaphor sings.
The philosophical undertones are never heavy—they glide effortlessly through the verses.
The beauty here is not just visual but emotional and intellectual.

Reading this felt like walking through a forest of thoughts and light.
So many poems stayed with me long after I’d closed the book.
They speak of love without sentimentality, of sorrow without despair.
Parihar’s observations are precise, yet never clinical—they are warm, personal, alive.
His love for the world pulses through every line.
The structure of the book flows like a river, gentle yet deep.
The imagery is striking but never forced—it emerges organically from the heart of each poem.
This collection is a meditation on being, on beauty, on transience.
It is a mirror to anyone willing to look inward.
The Elements of Beauty is, without doubt, a masterpiece to be cherished.