Genesis, or the beginning of existence, emanated from primal darkness, from the face of the bottomless deep. And global literature, from the start, through the centuries and to date, has been fascinated with this inscrutable force called darkness, later interchangeably called evil—be it the Bible, epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and writers like Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Milton, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Han Kang, Gillian Flynn and Ian McEwan, to name a few, have dwelt on it at length.

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Shikhandin’s ‘Turgescent Twilight’ carries poems arising from a similar void. Here, this transfixing blackness is not an absence, an emptiness associated with the inception of the universe, but an active presence. It is experienced faintly on occasion, but powerfully, deeply, and viscerally in others, not only at the core of one’s being, but universally as well. It has a magnetic force that draws in, confiscates, and shapes everything it touches, then transforms it into itself. For readers new to Shikhandin, this name is the nom de plume of this writer, who prefers privacy and non-identification with gender, as the writer within their personhood has no gender, or is made up of all genders, like the character Shikhandi in the Indian epic The Mahabharata.

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In this volume of fifty-one poems, divided into five sections, darkness, at first, approaches the readers at the indeterminate time of twilight, hesitantly, inaudibly, almost invisibly. In the opening section ‘Hell Rising Tenderly’ it manifests itself at the start as mild disquiet, “… fear lurks. Crouching/ deep inside/ your marrow.” (Twilight), and then it sneaks into other beings, into the night watchman, for instance, who could be the poet’s alter ego or yours, who stays “hidden at the turn/ of menace” (Introspection), only to gain a more universal and palpable presence, “I am the carrier/ of epidemics. I pass/ through time with my load. I walk/ until  I find a willing soul.” (I Am That is You) and, finally, it embeds itself inextricably into time, people and their memories, refusing to “die even after/ it has been hacked and burnt. The ashes buried/in a salt pit.” (Black Siesta) In this “endless land/with its load of blistering, festering people propelled/through life like an ooze,” the impulse, an impossibly distraught one, is to succumb to the dark. (Train Ride), or give in to an inherent anger, “To crush this earth/Between the two palms of my hands.” (It’s Been There All Along)

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To reiterate, Shikhandin’s blackness is not interstitial; it is not a gap that will eventually and certainly be filled with something else, like light, perhaps; instead, it is durable, existing not in the past but in the present, and enduring with unrelenting, terrifying intensity and expansiveness. It stretches and swells (as the word ‘turgescent’ in the title says) from the body to the mind, and then to the spirit, moving from the natural world to liminal spaces and then to planetary systems, with an elasticity that combines lean, fibrous strength with supple flexibility. The ten poems in the second section, ‘Nightmare Edge of Dreaming’, shift the definition of malevolence away from destruction of and within individuals toward the systemic devastation of entire ecosystems—species, biospheres—and planetary systems as well, highlighting cosmocide and macro-level radical evil. It moves from a requiem for the living, “We do not pray any more for the dead/instead, we screw the living.” (We Do Not Pray for the Dead), to the decimation of cities: “A wide city, grasping/the legs of a country in a hurry/to be a bigger bully than/ the one that had bullied it once.” (Fences), and “we end up lighting too many fires. Visible/ from above, beyond the darkest hauntings/ of our cloud-dry skies.” (Forsaken Bodies) to the destruction of stellar systems, an apocalypse of sorts, where the moon laments “Let me find another dimension” for what she calls “The closure of all closures.” (Moon Askew)

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Shikhandin’s blackness in this collection bears within it darknesses of all manner, in layers, stratified and stacked: from the ambiguous contagion of negativity, the grey underbelly of gloom, to evil, hatred, vengeance, death, murder, mass destruction, disease, cruelty, sin, temptation, fear, anger, grief, loss, betrayal, prejudice, internal emptiness, anxiety, depression, existential crisis, and so much more—things that can catapult lives into chaos, and into a dystopian existence devoid of any values and meaning as it is bereft of the scaffolding of traditional morality. The third section, titled 'Raging Earth, Keening Sky', gives us an inkling of this. It introduces us to a world marked by desensitisation in both people and cities. It begins by describing a landscape "tacked on to a single haze-toned/ horizon, with our dreams dripping down/ from technicolour to black and white" (Charge of the Monochrome Brigade). This section then shifts to scenes of destruction, such as raging forest fires that "scorches earth to cinders," and where the “silence of chitinous creatures/tests life’s narrowest endurance" as humanity "chases nature in circles and spirals" (Night of Fire). The imagery culminates in bleak despair, represented by a murder of brooding crows that peck away at humanity's sanity and crush the hopes found in "the eyes of a million people waiting/ in the long, wet night.” (Crows), and the utter loss of hope represented by beating winds that bear ill-tidings of a world in utter disarray where all everyone can do is “…watch/as the horror unfolds” (Tidings)

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‘Deadlocked in the Darkling’, the collection’s fourth section, opens with a brush with Death. Will its darkness frighten or soothe? “In the dark, her eyes shine/with the knowledge of cats/that know all the alleys of the night.” Like felines patrolling their territory in streetlight shadows, Death, too, projects an air of deep, secret awareness of mortality's limits. (The Writer of Myths Looks Up to See Death at Her Window) Then there is the encounter with the ‘Darkest One’ (primal consciousness?), cruel and compassionate by turn, who watches with “riotous mirth”, “the men fighting to possess,/ fighting to be possessed.” And weeps for women “who chose to be bereft” with little knowledge of “what freedom she has poured/into their bangled hands.” To say, that, like these, the remaining poems in this section are uncomfortable is to say the least, as the poems don’t downplay darkness or project it as a slip, an error in judgement, one that will step away with time from our path, but view it as an active force with a Protean ability to slip beneath your skin and leave you seized with dread and helplessness, like the war’s darkness that follows the soldiers, eroding boundaries between battlefields and homes. This section also introduces women who embrace the calamitous and confront their nemesis head-on, letting us smell danger in their words and actions as they interrogate injustice. They are women who indulge in frenzied dances, allow fires to engulf them and their infants, walk the streets brazenly with eyes inked from pots of dead night, and look out into the sullen sea and gain the name of the Hag’s Head in the Cliffs of Moher. (Bells, Fire & Water, The Gypsy Women of Cooum, and Hag’s Head). 

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The final section, titled 'Songs from the Deep End of Twilight', delves into the depths of darkness on Earth, while also exploring both liminal spaces and the cosmos. Readers are invited to embark on this journey through imagery, emotions, and language that often oscillates between gentle blooms and sudden bursts. This exploration compels us to confront the weight of transgressions and the forbidden, as well as the tumultuous emotions that arise. Shikhandin contemplates whether the liminal world—characterised by soft, deceptive light—represents hope or resembles “dark matter that thrives. / Wicked and strange and unrevealed” (Mirror World). Additionally, the question is raised: if humanity were to enter a state of cryosleep, a form of suspended animation, would we experience a “sparking lack of fear,” or would we instead find ourselves in a world that “abhors and rejects or hunts humankind” (Morning After Cryosleep)? Hope emerges when humanity on Earth ultimately turns away from a false emissary who urges an exodus into treacherous terrain, but not before enduring profound suffering (Exodus).

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If Shikhandin has the personal and moral courage to deal with the vicissitudes of darkness, whether it is in the Himalayas, Pompeii in South Italy, the Cooum River in Tamil Nadu, the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean or the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune, the readers, too, are advised to brace their straps to take an unstinting dekko at darkness. Shikhandin brings poetry in this volume to its extreme limit, to the outer periphery of what visual and linguistic attention can bring to the concept of darkness. In this sense, it is perhaps typical of Shikhandin’s considerable body of work—other evocative prose and poems over the years—whose imagery and language bear the same potency.

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Friedrich Nietzsche once cautioned against staring into the abyss, warning that doing so might lead one to absorb its darkness. Those who dare to delve into this volume must confront the depths of both human and non-human malevolence, risking the haunting images that may gaze back at them and linger in their innermost being. Do these poems embody Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, the will to power and self-awareness, as a response—a survival mechanism, if you will—to the nihilism that arises from life’s inherent darkness, its persistence, and the absence of an explanation for it? In Shikhandin’s words, “It is all about faith. / That eagerness to be surprised.” Or does Shikhandin leave one to succumb to the darkness like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, losing his identity and humanity, and lamenting “the horror, the horror"? Shikhandin ponders, “What if what is out there is a new hell? What if what is out there is a new paradise?” Readers must arrive at their own interpretations.