Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that a poet’s foremost responsibility lies in discovering the right metaphors to express their ideas. Metaphors, as he suggested, are not mere decorative elements but foundational to poetry’s power to communicate profound truths. TS Eliot emphasised the importance of the “objective correlative,” the perfect alignment between an emotion or idea and the symbolic representation that evokes it. The poetic practice of Prafull Shiledar exemplifies such poetic principles in remarkable ways. Across the range of themes and motifs explored in Scratching the Silence: Selected Poems, Shiledar demonstrates a masterful ability to find metaphors that feel inevitable and organic to the ideas they convey. Through dense imagery and subtle emotional undertones, he invites the reader into a world where words and ideas are in harmonious union with feeling and emotion.

For Shiledar, language is not merely a tool for communication but the very foundation of human sensibility. In his poem “Taste of Water,” he articulates this beautifully:

The alphabets at the bottom
anchor the flow of language …
The flowing waters of language
bestow a vision so vivid.

He suggests that through language, we gain not only the ability to articulate but also the capacity to envision and empathise. In a fragmented world, this “flowing water of language”...

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