review-essay on V, S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness (1964), Ezekiel delineates with candor and fairness the nature of Naipaut's undertaking, and says: "I am not in fact doubting his veracity, only his approach towards the discovery of the truth. He makes the truth about India seem simple. I don't believe it is simple," Ezekiel finds Naipaul lacking in proper commitment to his subject matter: "My quarrel is that Mro Naipaul is so often uninvolved and unconcerned," He admonishes Naipaul in these words: "Poise, a sense of proportion and that irony which Mr. Naipaul finds lacking in Indians, must be maintained if one wants to help. Otherwise, criticism is self-indulgence. It must attack, even denounce, but it must not deny human beings their humanityc" The critical articles published here represent a range of insights pertaining to Ezekiel's themes and techniques. With the exception of Michael Carman's essay, all of the other studies are fresh and hitherto unpublished. Most of these are by comparatively young scholar-critics who have paid serious, close, and perceptive attention to Ezekiel's texts, which characterize much of current literary scholarship. However, these essays are not intended to be definitive studies of the various aspects of Ezekiel's work; they are aimed at providing a good introduction. In his brilliant essay, Michael Garman treats Ezekiel as a voyager or a pilgrim who burns with the sense of commitment to life, and who creates a wholly personal myth out of his own immediate experiences. He mentions the names of Eliot and Auden as clear influences on Ezekiel's work, but does well in not dealing with the latter's poetic achievement in "any other terms than his own." Chetan Karnani provides a brief but useful comment on Ezekiel"s use of irony in depicting Bombay's bogus hurly-burly in his poetry, and his ability to bring words evocatively alive in new contextSc Kc D. Verma concentrates on the poems of The Unfinished Man (1960), and deals quite comprehensively with the displacement of myth' in the fallen city of Ezekiel's poetry.. Utilizing Northrop Frye's critical vocabulary, Verma successfully demonstrates the epistemological character of Ezekiel's poems in The Unfinished Man. Christopher Wiseman's paper offers a thorough and balanced study of Ezekiel's craftsmanship and poetic techniques in The Unfinished Man (1960) and The Exact Name (1965), Wiseman maintains that "prior to The Exact Name, Ezekiel's poetry is notable for an extreme technical formality," and that it is in The Exact Name that he breaks away from this stifling formality and discovers his own true voicec However, the lines which Wiseman reads as rigidly iambic, Ezekiel would read "somewhat more casually, informally, conversationaltyo" Vasant A. Shahane probes the religious-philosophical aspect of Ezekiel's poetry, particularly in the post-1967 poems, and he seems to tie Ezekiel's posture of 'prayer' with his 'voyage of discovery' " the LSD trip of April 1967, though he realizes that the word 'prayer' and the mood relevant to it are as old in Ezekiel's art as A Time To Change (1952)e Shahane has produced a fascinating paper on a complex subject, indeed as complex as Ezekiel's own statement: "I am not a religious or even a moral person in any conventional senseo Yet, I've always felt myself to be religious and moral in some senseo The gap between these two statements is the existential sphere of my poetryc" Shiv Ko Kumar's analysis of Ezekiel's Poster Prayers is thoughtful and imaginative. He rightly points out that "the resultant emotion in the Poster Prayers is not of passive submission, but of defiant questioningo" Despite his own initial