All Is Embraced: Poems and Prose 2020-22

Pankaja Brooke on Robert Dhiraj’s latest poetry book

All Is Embraced: Poems and Prose 2020-22

by Robert Dhiraj

No Shadow, 2023

ISBN: 0648728927

ISBN: 9780648728924

paperback, 68 pages

One Saturday last year Omkar, who has been leading our weekly meditations in Queens Wood, read aloud one of Dhiraj’s poems* – which ended with the line:

the grace of annihilation…”

I just love that – doesn’t every human being long at the deepest part of their being to be annihilated?

Why do we love disasters and war movies and fireworks and explosions, long for Armageddon, Judgement Day, the Final Reckoning, the vanishing of the ego, the small self, whatever we like to call it?

Dhiraj and his brother were brought up by a single mother in post WW2 Manchester, from whence he escaped to many saddhu wanderings in India, a couple of times being repatriated by the dear old British Embassy, before ending up in Pune, with Osho.

Then Medina, the Ranch, and explorations in Tibet, India again, Ethiopia, Myanmar, ending up in Australia where he now lives with wife and daughter, and continues to write poetry.

His three books include poems, photographs, some stories and memories in prose… and I loved them.

* it was from the poem, Vow of a Bodhisattva, which is in the volume All Is Embraced

(This is the third publication, the first being The Cymbal Clash of Sky: Poems from Tibet, published in 2019; the second being a collection of poems and photos, Depart Into A New Tenderness: Collected Poems 1969-2019, self-published in 2020, both by No-Shadow.)