Binchehryache Kabhinna Tukade

This diseased contemporary world, capable of shaking the very foundations of existence, is shrouded in an immense darkness. How might someone like Ashwatthama or, for that matter, Sisyphus, groping blindly yet with a peculiar awareness through this darkness, grapple with the eternal and agonizing Upanishad of questions that fate has placed before them?

Akshay Shimpi’s poetry seeks to confront this colossal complexity and understand the unmasked human anguish of a fragmented, postmodern age. As much as it searches for the human ‘self’ that has been dispossessed and exiled by this inescapable reality, it also attempts to explore the all-consuming darkness of the age that envelops this very self.

Naturally, this poetry cannot afford to be conventionally gentle or delicate. And yet, it can hear the chirping of sparrows resuming in Wuhan after years of cries of anguish, or experience the trembling, tender sap of new leaves resonating in the cuckoo’s throat. It speaks as effortlessly through the traditional abhang form as it does through free verse. Through its unconventional imagery, it also seeks to forge a communion with the prose of everyday life.

Akshay Shimpi’s poetry is, in essence, a poetic attempt to take a selfie with this monstrous age.

— Abhijit Deshpande