Light and Darkness
Semeen Ali
SHIMMER SPRING: PROSE AND POETRY by Kiriti Sengupta Hawakal Publishers, 2020, 124 pp., 2500.00
January 2021, volume 45, No 1

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.’

–  Ezra Pound

As I began reading this anthology of poetry and prose, these lines by Ezra Pound seemed to reverberate across the entire volume of writings. In a new phase of world that we are living iere always exists a binary relationship between light and darkness—one remains incomplete if the other is not around. So do definitions that one gives to a particular concept that one has grown up with, has been familiarized with. The cycle that light and darkness are trapped in what seems existential at one level. Even when it comes down to expressions that are used, in terms of knowing something is to bring it to light while ignorance has been also referred to as being in darkness. Language plays an important role in defining cultures that one lives in, the changing dynamics of what at one point of time defines a culture can also be observed through the language that is in circulation, and in a similar way are light and darkness interlocked with each other, at a literal level as well as a metaphorical one.

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