If poetry reconstructs space, re-configures time, and re-conditions language, M. Athar Tahir’s effort is yet another at doing all these with certain finesse and dexterity.
Tahir takes on his vocation as a poet quite seriously: he is innovative in his thoughts and inventive in his expression. There is a palpable desire writ through the volume to appear and sound different. Even while the conditions around are much the same as ever, he presents them as objects and images as if being recognized, for the first time. It is yet another kind of familiarity that one might experience in reading these poems. We are all subjected to the perennial conditions of our lives and living but poets bring about a difference in how refreshingly they perceive them and how they help us re-configure our own selves. Tahir’s images and objects are neither too far to seek nor too difficult to recognize.
This happens because he can identify his word, image, and metaphor and construct his own complexity of meanings. His loom, therefore, is of the larger body—the physical and the non-physical, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the surreal.