Darkling I Listen

""What description would fit a book of poems better than "A book of poems"? I would say that this book holds in it everything that inspired my poetry- chaos and calm, ennui and inspiration, numbness and pain, horror and awe, and at times, an inexplicable rapture. This collection is one of my first last-ditch efforts (I know that I will feel myself hitting the rock bottom again, and then too, I will have to muster all my courage and pull myself out of the quagmire.) to revive the poet. Poetry, which came to me so easily, deserted me through my entire period as a research scholar. An all-pervasive tiredness, a lack of inspiration, a feeling of being too stifled to even feel seemed to alienate me from my gift of expression- something that ran through every sinew, every vein. I started feeling that I had run my course, and that my days as a poet were over. I intended to use this book as a way to jump-start the poet to life, by fulfilling the requisite- 21 poems in 21 days. However, I could not keep up with writing one poem everyday. The revival is steady, but slow. 10 poems have been written as a part of the challenge, the rest are poems that I wrote between 2015 to 2023, in no particular order. Since I wrote most of them during my Masters, many of the poems channelise my literary fervour by heavily alluding to other poets and authors. Bookleaf Publications, later, gave me the opportunity to add 50 more poems to the initial 21. The rest of the 50 have been compiled in a way, that the reader can witness the growth, and the journey of the poet, albeit in a descending order of age, from 30 to 7. In several places, the 30-year-old me had an insatiable itch to edit and revise some of the works from my childhood, but I stopped myself, so that I could present to my readers an unadulterated, and an un-adulted experience.""