Luminous Lines: Review of Naveen Kishore's ‘Ode To A Grieving Angel’

In Naveen Kishore’s third collection of poems, Ode to a Grieving Angel (Speaking Tiger), the poet is a ‘grieving being’. Excruciating as grief is, it also urges the poet to forge a vocabulary, to find words for the unspeakable, the unsaid. Language can never fully express sorrow or joy, anguish or ecstasy. But the poet, witness to the perpetual theatre of loss and love and longing, keeps trying.

The poet here is the quiet observer. The patient listener. As the narrator of one of the poems eloquently puts it: “There is a river in me… Heavy with thought. Resurrections. Shipwrecks and salvaged lives. Untamed. Full of sorrow. Full of heart.

Full of the debris of unclaimed anguish, the river in me whispers stories.

And I?

I listen.”

This collection is home to angels—falling, fallen, expelled, stumbling across the landscape, ‘wings drooping, trailing’. Beings, half dead and half alive, inhabit the pages. Like mortals, they too are afraid of the unknown. They too fear that ‘With a little provocation. A nudge in the wrong direction’, the fall over the rim may be into limbo. Kishore conjures a world drifting between dream and reality, training his lens on beings caught between the past and the insistent present, between life and death, darkness and light, ruin and resurrection. The imagery is vivid, haunting. Kishore’s theatre background and his photographer’s eye serve him well as a poet. I found the poem at the start of the collection particularly striking. The scope is vast; cycles of strife and creation play out on the poem’s stage. Life and death, memory and desire, anguish and ecstasy are all enacted here. A blind moon steps on stage, caught in the glare of spotlights; a grieving angel drags her wings across the stage; trapdoors rise from the stage floor, plunging the world into fog;  Shakespeare’s Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, all evoked. Actors buffeted by rain, snow, wind, ice and life’s tempests appear onstage. And “among the words/strewn across the stage/the stirrings of revolt/an alphabet uprising.”

Ode to a Grieving Angel has much to say about language. Some poems are shot through with the anxiety about the death of language and the fear of words being misused as weapons when the jackboots come marching. Even in overwhelming circumstances, there are exhortations to “dream up a mountain of words” and let hope take wing. One of the memorable poems in the collection is a love song for language, an ode to the alphabet. In it, a writer fashions a coffin in which he hides all the letters of the alphabet. He painstakingly wraps every one of them in oilskin to protect them from harm. After he digs a grave in which the coffin is to be placed, he lies down in the coffin alongside the alphabet. Both melancholy and tenderness flow through the veins of this poem, making it pulse like a beating heart. In another poem which traces the contours of language and the weight of letters, the narrator “swept the words off the page/Stared at the silences left behind/The weight of the letters. Like footsteps in the snow/Weeping.”    

Kishore’s poems gently lead the reader to a place where light and darkness intermingle. The dead await resurrection; the speechless find a voice when the poet intervenes; angels hurtle earthward; mortals contemplate their “wingless selves”,  “still whispering/courage courage”. To those despairing of the world’s vagaries, there are insights that shine a light on our collective despair. For the grieving, there is acknowledgement of the darkness. For the lost, there is kinship in the cadence of these lines.

Some of the questions that haunted the poems in Kishore’s Knotted Grief (2022) and Mother Muse Quintet (2023) surface in this new collection as well. The human struggle to process grief, bereavement, betrayal, pain; the quest to make peace with loss; the dictates of the “un holy cathedral” of the heart that leave us baffled—all of it lurk in the wings, all of it step onstage.
As the lights flicker, answers slowly take shape. The poet does not pin down the angelic and the trembling within the confines of definitive meanings. The mysterious is mercifully allowed enough room to breathe in these pages.   

 (Naveen Kishore is a poet, photographer, theatre lighting designer and publisher, Seagull Books)