Hymns to deserts By Nand Kishore Acharya

“Desert, sand and void together constitute an extremity, both of existence and experience. To cope with them the language, even of poetry, requires a bareness, a reduction to the bones, as it were. Nand Kishore Acharya, a senior Hindi poet, is able to cope with the extremity since he is not an outsider or a chanced visitor to the sand dunes, but someone who is inside it : he lives and feels it, he explores it as part of his living experience. His poetic articulation ranges from the utterly bare to the deeply sensuous and he is able to write a poetry of the desert which is not only rare in Hindi but also anywhere else. Desert emerges not so much as a vacuity but a habitat of many complex human relationships in surprising assertions and unusuals intimations. Desert is, as it were