A new collection by the celebrated poet, essayist and publisher, Naveen Kishore, which proves again why he is among the most distinctive and daring Indian poets writing in English today.
Dazzled by both a blinding light and encroaching darkness, Naveen Kishore s characters in this sequence of poems hover above the page, both half living and half dead. He allows an alphabet, rising, to find the speechless and speak with them, to enter their bodies.
Their words, at times blood-stained, heavy with memory, are sparse. Shadowlike, they pay elegiac tribute to the impossibility of speech while they drift through landscapes stripped of meaning, bathed in the dark flames of death.
Kishore stands back from these theatres of longing and grief, allowing his characters to inhabit multiple worlds of illusion and possibility, wherein their disparate voices may find the unspeakable to speak of and speak for.
In these realms of dream and illusion is a savage beauty, one in which the imagined and the actual merge in the brilliance of ineffable speech. A mysterious interweaving of the painful and the ecstatic is present in these poems in the form of the angelic, trembling, flickering and quaking in an emptiness that is none other than our own.
About the Author
Born in Calcutta in 1953, Naveen Kishore received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature in 1973, and began working as a theatre lighting designer. He established Seagull Books in 1982, a publishing programme focusing on drama, film, art and culture studies. Today, it also publishes literature in translation, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Kishore is the recipient of the Goethe Medal, a Chevalier de l Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature (2021) and the Cesare De Michalis Prize for Publishing (2022). His first volume of poetry, Knotted Grief, was published in 2022, and his second, Mother Muse Quintet, in 2024. Kishore lives and works in Calcutta, India.
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