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Reading through Asif Barkhiya’s collection of poems “Veils of Darkness” one wishes that one knew more about the poet than he is a young man and a non-academic. In his poetry, the questions of good versus evil, light versus darkness, virtue versus calumny—all those much-maligned binarities—are once again raised. His poetry says something important, something that is worth listening to and it says it in a powerful way. And such power of expression comes from a basic honesty. In fact, honesty is a kind of intelligence, and there is plenty of that intelligence in the poems of Asif Barkhiya. Short, unembellished, almost stark in their purity (no metaphor, no simile to speak of), the poems collected here address some important aspects of human life in a universal fashion. For a generation tired of modernist discourse this kind of writing should be a welcome change.