Book Description:Kunwar Narain is a pre-eminent poet, and a major senior literary figure today. His work has spanned the last five decades, continuously evolving and expanding its own boundaries. It is a remarkable body of work, marked by a rare purity and profundity. The poems embody a unique simultaneity of the simple and the layered, entailing a patient uncovering of resonances, lived equally in poetry and in life. A complex interplay of metaphysical imagination, playful irony and tentative sentiment markes the basic temper of his poetry, which lodges itself in an all encompassing reality and then tests it as only the most honest literature can. In these poems, surprises are located not so much in artifices of form or name as in the primal energies of life and love themselves