It came as a surprise to me that Asir Ajmal is a poet and a short story writer. On top of it, he writes in three languages: English, Urdu and Punjabi. Thus far, I had known Ajmal only as a psychologist. It will not be an exaggeration if I assert that he is the best in the business. He earned his PhD in cognitive psychology from Dartmouth College, Hanover, in the USA. Working in England and a society like Nicaragua has equipped him with diverse experience. I have heard him talk on quite profound subjects with fantastic clarity. He knows Hebrew and German and can speak and read these languages fluently.

Picking up a multi-layered topic and describing it in such a way that it becomes accessible to all and sundry is Ajmal’s forte. Once, he contested the most believed notion of how human beings think and the role that the human mind plays in constructing a thought. That was one of the most profound talks I heard at Government College University, Lahore. His mastery of the art of locution gives him the status of a sage among his students and younger faculty members. I was aware of his penchant for music. When I got his book of poetry, another dimension was added to my perception of his already multifaceted persona. In this era of general despair, when nothing seems to be going right for us, only poets, with their uncanny creative genius, can pull us out of the swamp of daunting challenges we are stuck in.

Robert Frost once said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal, which the reader recognises as his own. “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar,” said PB Shelley, a great romantic poet. While reading Last Days, time and again, I tended to hark back to the time and space when mavericks like Shelley and Byron lived, breathed and composed poetry. To my limited understanding of their poetry, it transcends any structure or any set of intellectual limits. Subjects and themes included in the book are so varied that categorising Ajmal is a tough ask. Rhyme and the enormity of imagination are attributes that he shares with these iconic figures. Ajmal ensures that rhyme and rhythm work like musical notes in his poetry. Thus, he epitomises what Edgar Allan Poe says about poetry, “I would define, in brief, the poetry of words, as the rhythmical creation of poetry.”

What impresses the reader is the themes he picks as the subjects of his poetry. It is steeped in tradition, the way he perceives it. The way he articulates it broadens its tenor and scope. These poems reveal the powerful imagination that inhabits Ajmal enabling him to shatter the thematic, temporal and rational confines. The Master of My Soul epitomises that trend. The same can be said about the poem titled Geography.

Ajmal puts his imagination to the optimum, rather unrestrictive, use along with the rhythm. That’s how he invokes and articulates freedom. His unbound and intimate engagement with nature creates fantastic imagery. In this book, he experiments with several genres, including the Japanese form called haiku. This unrhymed poetic form consists of 17 syllables arranged in three lines containing five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. Thus, Ajmal does not shy away from experimenting with less familiar forms.

Last Days

Author: Asir Ajmal

Pages: 76, Kindle

Price: $4.15

The reviewer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be reached at tahir.kamran@bnu.edu.pk