An Armless Hand Writes is Srivastava’s second book of poems. Most of the fifty one poems the book contains, deal with the complex interaction of conscious and unconscious aspects and processes of human psyche and personality—individual as well as collective—both involved in unresting cycles of realities and dreams, necessitating retrieval, oftentimes painful from memory—again individual as well as collective. They help us delve into ambiguous, unbridged, fragmented, and obfuscated diversities of various aspects and processes, particularly those which are quiescent for long but keep floating occasionally, exhibiting clashes and disturbances within. And in the poems, insurmountable problems concerned with the “self” and the “I” and intricate relationships between the whole and the parts and vice versa never get blurred or remain fugacious. This book continues in the tradition of Srivastava’s first book of poems, Ineluctable Stillness, which Bernard M. Jackson, a prominent poet from U.K., in his incisive review, described as “the work of a perfectionist in his natural element”, “intellectually challenging” and “having distinct echoes of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ with perhaps an added flavouring of playwright Samuel Beckett”. In tackling and describing his themes, Srivastava ensures that the primacy of intellect, intuition, and imagination is never dethroned in the poems. Those who read the book with patience will certainly enjoy it and would like to read it again and again.

Table of Contents:
I (For those, unable to step out of themselves); Serious Poetry, My Dear Phoebeans, Is Not Schizophrenic Verbalism; Love And Relationship; Oppressiveness Of Nothingness; Cicada And Harlot; Vexations; Mother; Thy Face; Great Anarch; Allusions; Old Man And His Conflicts; Fading Roots Of Childhood; Disintegrated Self; Vespers Of Life; Confusions; Grotesque Masks; Broken Time; Oh! That One Year Get-together And Our Very Own, Mr Monsieur Maillard; Rare Moments; God And Beggar; Imageries Or Dull Realities; Confessions Of A Modern Anchorite; She Amid The Rains At Midnight; Etiolated Desires; Life And Rhythms; Tamed Life In Clouds; An Unfinished Journey; Random Thoughts; Eroded Memories; Seeking Solace In An Empty Room; Artless Art; Riot And The Young Lady; Dreams Versus Realities; For My Friends And Foes Alike; Half-truths; My School Teacher; Tears Of A Child; Beauty Is Not Enough; Trust; Blissful End; Of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Superfluous People”; Feelings; Escapist; Phenomena; Connectivity; It; Unremembered People; Temple And Tavern; Shadows And Lost Relations; Iniquitous Survival; An Evening In That Tavern (1980); And The Budding Poetess Averred, “Word is memory; memory word”