Aakash Dharti Ko Khatkhataata Hai

Vinod Kumar Shukla is one of the few poets in the world of contemporary poetry who has significantly controlled the direction and vision of contemporary poetry. Almost all Hindi poets have acknowledged his status. Only Shamsher could have achieved such meaningful use of limited statements in poetic expression. Vinod Kumar Shuklas poetry is a useful resource for learning how to accumulate a wealth of meaning with minimal use of words. His poetry, despite being utterly contemporary, appears timeless. It looks back and forward, yet the remarkable thing is that despite being steeped in its own time, it does not get trapped in its own time. The unmistakable, transparent subtlety of his poetic understanding appears to many as an embodiment of complexity, formalism, and artism, but it is not formalist poetry. There is no greater poet than him in poetic experiments, at least in Hindi today. He is not a poet who traverses the bridge of ideology, but rather a poet who swims across the river of poetry. At least the struggle of his long poetic career presents this example before us. He is among those few poets in the world of Hindi poetry who have broken the current idiom and chosen a unique dimension for sensibility and poetic craft in their poetry. Very few poets have been as rare, restrained, and conscious in their choice of poetic language as he is. This is a collection of his selected poems.