Mauro Montakkyesi, the celebrated scholar and great literary luminary from Rome reviews Epicasia Vol 2.
Thanks to you dear friend for your kind words.
CRITICAL REVIEW OF
EPICASIA VOL. 2
by Dr. Jernail Singh Anand
Introduction: The Prophet of the Post-Epic World
If Epicasia Vol. 1 is a dive into the shadowy soulscapes of postmodernity, Epicasia Vol. 2 is that reverberating thunderclap of an echo, sounding through the existential wastelands of a world where oracles have been replaced by algorithms and morality by mechanization. The indefatigable bard, the radical recorder of spiritual decay, the fearless Jernail Singh Anand brings forth this second epic entwined into twelve epics.
The book isn’t just a work of literature; it’s a mythopoetic manifesto — a confrontation with civilization in all its guises, posing in the form of an epic.
Form and Structure:
The Esoteric Mythos, Satire, Prophetic Voice and Alchemy
From Geet: The Unsung Song of Eternity to The Canterbury Tales, this book is a polyphonic symphony of philosophical dirges, existential satire, and moral cosmology. Anand’s formalism still radiates unconventional power — there are cantos and choruses, soliloquies and satanic stage directions, not to mention sprawling mythological allusions.
The result is not a linear narrative, but a circular explosion of meanings. The structure is cathedral-like: every poem an altar, every stanza a cracked stained glass through which light and darkness simultaneously stream.
Central Themes:
The Banquet of Chaos and the Starvation of Ethics
Post-Edenic Fall and Ontological Anguish
In Geet and beyond, the poetic subject mourns the loss not just of paradise, but of a why. The Adamic lament—“Why was I born?”—saturates the text with ontological exhaustion. Anand dramatizes the Fall not as a single sin but as a recursive error loop embedded in civilization’s DNA.
Satire of Institutions
Religion becomes a showroom of noise. Education, a “Manchester of Non-sense.” Marriage, a Faustian contract disguised in lace. Anand skewers these systems without mercy, not from cynicism but from ethical urgency. The grotesque parodies of The Satanic Guidemap and the Public Square Executions leave the reader appalled and awed in equal measure.
Love, Lust, and the Execution of the Human Heart
In Anand’s universe, Love is not merely spurned — it is guillotined in public. They dress themselves as saints and march in Satan’s infernal parade as Lust, Greed and Doublespeak! Anand’s upending of virtue isn’t just sensationalist, it is his poetic vehicle to diagnose our cultural autoimmune failure.
Philosophy and the Disfigured Logos
Socrates is dragged in chains. Shakespeare becomes a weapon. Plato is marked as dangerous. Anand reclaims them and is then relatable witness to their fall in the streets of corrupted modernity.
He mourns not just lost philosophers, but a lost philosophia perennis—a wisdom tradition defiled by pragmatism and profit.
Stylistic Register:
Sermon, Satire, Scripture, and Song
Anand’s language oscillates between scriptural gravitas and sardonic theatre.
He will channel the Gita in one breath, and call for Marlowe and Orwell in the next. It’s theatrical without being histrionic, moralistic without being tendentious. The rhythm is deliberately uneven: a literary jazz score that mirrors the very chaos it laments.
Innovation: The Dramatic Epic Reborn
Perhaps the most radical feature of Epicasia Vol. 2 is its reclamation of the dramatic epic. Anand does not merely narrate—he stages. Faustus is reborn as a demonic everyman. Satan organizes political conferences. Archangels deliver monologues worthy of dystopian theatre. The result is a hybrid form that redefines what epic poetry can do in the twenty-first century: not just sing of heroes, but dissect their disfigurement.
Comparative Legacy: Anand Among Giants
Where Homer chants the nobility of war, Anand reveals the banality of evil. Where Milton pities the Fall, Anand mocks it, autopsies it, and sets it ablaze. He is closer to Dante in moral scope but more ferocious, less forgiving.
Blanchot’s thought, with its endless horizon of emptied language, comes to mind, as does Bataille and Deleuze; and further back one can hear Blake and Nietzsche.
No modern poet — maybe no poet, period — has more consistently maintained the epic voice over twelve bloated works with such integrity and critical mass. He is not simply reporting on the fall of man; rather, he is erecting a new monument over its ruins with warnings and whispered prayers etched into stone.
Conclusion: Epicasia as Ethical Wake-Up Call
Epicasia Vol. 2 is a catastrophic symphony—an opera of the soul in a world that has replaced sacred rites with credit scores and conscience with convenience. Dr. Jernail Singh Anand offers no easy redemption, but he does offer clarity. And in an age addicted to spectacle, clarity itself is a revolution.
This book should be read not as a sequel, but as a counter-testament: the last light before the temple gates are shut. In Anand, we meet the last epicist standing—a man who will not stop singing, even as the world forgets how to listen.
Anand The Last Lightkeeper
In the quiver and digital dust of the age, where empires glitch and anthems fade, stands the Anand, lone upon the ruins’ crest,
a prophet unbent, a spirit unpressed.
His poems—cathedrals crumbled but full with heaven, carved with laughter, sorrow, and backbone, Geet rises as from a phoenix choir, songs unsongs, yet set afire.
He does not talk in sandals but seismic verse, drags Socrates through traffic’s curse, unmasks the Devil in a statesman’s dress, Angels are falling and oracles are a mess.
He cries to Marlowe, Plato, Blake, not for solace, but for the stake. A mythmaker in post-epic frock, his dirges for humanity’s sad sack.
Marriage to him becomes the Faustian mask, education—a mill of empty bands, and love—is guillotined on the marble stand, his pen, a scalpel. His muse, our rage.
A stanza, light cracking glass, a canto, a sermon in easeful night, he sings not of victories but of fall, of dimming logos, of moral crawl.
Oh Anand! Lost flame’s guard, weeps Dante, hides his Milton name. You roar where silence raised the beast, and feast on truth when lies have feast.
Then sing the stanza, chaos let hear,— Anand is the place where all disappear. Not to grieve, but to re-create the song, one last epic, fierce and long.
