Meeting With Christ and Other Poems

2013

by Deepak Chaswal

Meeting with Christ and Other Poems is written by internationally renowned poet Deepak Chaswal. His poetry has been widely appreciated by eminent poets, critics, and poetry lovers around the globe.

Prof. Hugh Fox (Professor Emeritus of Michigan State University, archaeologist, editor, writer, and iconic poet of international fame) has liked and appreciated this book in these words: "One of the deepest, widest, most universal poetry books ever written about individual spirituality in a world-wide context. And Chaswal has the single most original view of Christianity in all its totality and specifics of anyone else on the contemporary scene. What he wants is individual sanity, salvation, an escape from the depravities of the modern world into an ancient oneness with the universe, a kind of reworking of human spirituality, so that it really functions and Man as such can glide into, drift into individual completeness. Christ isn't someone distant for Chaswal but someone he goes to Jerusalem to meet and converse with, all about a return to essential humanity. He hates greed, selfishness, in a sense the whole mechanical-cybernetic drifting of the modern world into a flow that is turning humankind into something minor and self-involved that it was never intended to be. Chaswal identifies with blacks, whites, Indians in India, Americans....you name it, he identifies with it. Universalism at its most universal. You read his poetry and you go through a kind of spiritual renewal."

In the words of Candice James, Poet Laureate, New Westminster, BC CANADA: "Deepak Chaswal is a master of words and weaves them into an intricate pattern that indelibly imprints the mind. His poem, 'Man', tells succinctly the story of our existence from cradle to grave. In 'Day of Judgement' Chaswal's poetry wanders the bleak alleyways of ignorance, atrocity, and man's inhumanity to man. He then leads us from the paths of iniquity into a gentle serenity with his musing in his poem 'Joy'. Deepak Chaswal bares his soul to bleed onto every page that you may be further enriched for reading it."

Felix Nicolau (prolific poet, novelist, critic and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at "Hyperion" University of Bucharest, Romania, where he is the Dean of Faculty of Letters and Foreign Languages) observes: "Now and again Christ pops up before our eyes - bearer of intense messages. But when He emerges in front of the Poet there’ll be some mind-twisting revelation for sure. Deepak Chaswal regretfully conjures apocalypse and playfully takes snapshots of voracious appearances. His art can’t sit legs crossed and contemplate ivory towers. Every verse in this book testifies for or against something, proving the intellectual and political charge of contemporary poetry. Then, the details and frailties of a world in turmoil are cunningly surprised by the poet. Such an art refutes the confined vision of Cyclops and energetically assumes the thousand-eyed body of Argus. More than ever, the poet is a seer, full of experience and innocence in the same time."

Philip Ellis, a freelance critic, poet and scholar from Australia comments: "The poetry of Deepak Chaswal's Meeting with Christ and Other Poems invokes the exterior world in language both spiritual and secular, so that the world becomes something newer and stranger than what it was in the past. It is also a melange of images and motifs which appear, disappear and reappear throughout this collection, and it is a body of work unique to his life experiences and his worldview. It is a poetry where the tropes of Western religion, such as Christ and angels, encounter Chaswal's eastern milieu and are transformed, made, again, strange. The result of all this is a verbal and formal richness, using rhyme and free verse alike in its dexterity, and poems that are both distinctive."

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