Book Review: Knotted Grief by Naveen Kishore (Speaking Tiger, 2022)

Lopamudra Basu reviews Naveen Kishore’s poetry collection Knotted Grief (Speaking Tiger, 2022) and observes how he breaks new ground both in the themes he focuses on and the techniques used to shape the collection.

         Naveen Kishore is well known as the founding publisher of Seagull Books in Calcutta which since 1982 has published books on drama, film, literature, and cultural studies. This is Kishore’s debut collection of poetry, in which he breaks new ground both in the themes he focuses on and the techniques used to shape the collection.

The collection begins with “Coda” which is startling as the coda is usually a concluding section to a musical work. Kishore is playing with time and sequencing when he inserts the image of a “young widow” who “waits and waits” in this short introduction to the long poem  “Kashmiriyat.” In the light of all that is narrated of the ongoing humanitarian disaster unfolding in Kashmir, “Coda”  represented by the figure of the traumatized young widow seems to stand in both as an introductory and concluding figure, whose grief is cyclical and unremitting through successive waves of violence and strife in the conflict zone of Kashmir.