![]() #Movingimages kishore fullThe word “ash”, the image of something being gutted (“ash-coloured leaves”, “a dream in ashes”, “forest/ full of tree trunks/ gutted”) and the spareness of the landscape are repeatedly evoked. Kishore is also no stranger to the power of repetition. A “red-faced” chinar, for instance, “stands helpless/ its sapling drawing from wasted limbs”. ‘Kashmiriyat’ has all the formulaic Kashmir tropes but they don’t perform the way in which one would expect them to. Through lines and phrases such as “burst into flame/ solitary flower immolating/ your petals detonating/ like suicide vests”, “a sky full of bullet wounds” and “dogs sniffing blood/ on chinar leaves”, Kishore juxtaposes one kind of image with its exact opposite - in this case, gentle and beautiful images from the natural world with images of violence. There is a sinuousness to the words as they move through the poem, teasing out images, moving swiftly and easily from the concrete to the abstract, establishing unexpected connections and juxtapositions - all very much in the spirit of the haiku. The lines tend to be short (varying from one word to three, sometimes four) but there is nothing staccato about them. ‘Kashmiriyat’ is striking both in terms of how carefully etched its images are and in its unusual approach to line length. The first section - a long poem titled ‘Kashmiriyat’ on the trauma caused by the violence in Kashmir - consists of 105 stanzas, each of which work like short, stand-alone poems. Haiku-like and delicate as butterfly wings, the poems in Naveen Kishore’s collection Knotted Grief traverse the landscape of grief and loss. ![]()
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