In woe we sing | Review of ‘Ode to a Grieving Angel’, poems by Naveen Kishore

The epigraph to Naveen Kishore’s luminous book of poems, Ode to a Grieving Angel, reads like a description of an artist’s life in all its hard materiality: somewhere between/ the despairing slopes of fingers/ hardened skin full of crevices/ covered with ink bleeding/ onto the page smudges struggling/ to swim and resist/ being dragged under…The poems are arranged in four cycles with a tail-end coda. At their epicentre is the archetype of the angel, the one with broken wings who grieves an accumulation of losses. The angel becomes the poet’s persona, safeguarding meaning. The muse must speak in a “voice that has lost its memory”. Words must be found, the voice re-discovered in the nothingness.The first cycle of poems brings us to a stage peopled with characters from Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, to the interplay of spotlight and shadow, to actors and audience. It offers a rich, sensory experience of theatre, of the artistry of lighting and design. Kishore’s poems have eyes:The curtain goes up on a dark stage. Nothing new inthat. Nor the fact that it is Hamlet being staged.Should one decide not to read the above as lines from a prose poem, the lineation appears to enact the movement, the spilling over of the darkness from the stage onto the auditorium. “Nothing new in/ that” is a disruptive and abrupt sort of enjambment, the syntactic unit deliberately split. The “in” stranded at the end of the first line creates a tiny moment of suspension and the reader has to cross the line to complete the thought.Elsewhere in the same cycle, the curtain for Hamlet rises to a “lesser dark”. It is the sort of dark to which “your eyes may adjust”.Difficulty of speakingWhat happens when language fails? This question is the focal point of the second cycle. The very alphabet is bloodless. The arrangement of words in this cycle mimics the failure of language. One word lines fill the page in staccato bursts. With a couple of exceptions, the longest a line gets is four words. The opening stanzas read:Blunt. Time,tongues ‘choke’overspeechchalk-coateddaylightknocks all night longat eyes stitchedshutblunt timerefusesa strange reticencelaps at the shoresThe lines are fragmented and breathless, the form enacting the difficulty of speaking. Kishore’s use of double space between words in the same line (“knocks/ all night long” and “at eyes/ stitched”) is deliberate, indicating hesitation and disruption rather than mindful pause.“a strange reticence/ laps at the shores” contains a striking shift in metaphor. We move from choking, chalk, knocking, stitching — hard, abrasive, constricting images — to the image of water lapping at the shores. Poet and author Naveen Kishore is also the publisher of Seagull Books. Performing languageIn cycle three, the angel which stitches all the poems together has to endure state violence and brutality. Tried without a trial, he is sentenced to death and expelled. Simultaneously, the angel persona in heaven (there is one and that is a “she”) finds that she is no longer sheltered. There is a powerful call to “rehearse the revolution”, to subvert from below.In the final cycle, the speaker discovers that there is no one in particular that he is speaking to, that “there never had been anyone”. In a haikuesque move, he sweeps the words off the page, stares at the letters left behind.These are poems written in the spirit of mono no aware — the pathos of things, imbued with a gentle sadness. Their locus is “the poet as a grieving being/ one who suffers as she records”. What we take away from Ode to a Grieving Angel is not a failure of language but a fine and strategic performance of it, gesturing to all that we must not speak about. Ode to a Grieving Angel: Poems Naveen KishoreSpeaking Tiger Books₹399The reviewer’s most recent book is Footnotes to the Mahabharata (2025). Published - September 04, 2026 05:45 pm IST