In woe we sing | Review of ‘Ode to a Grieving Angel’, poems by Naveen Kishore
This article reviews Naveen Kishore’s poetry collection, 'Ode to a Grieving Angel,' focusing on its exploration of loss, theatre, and the limitations of language. The reviewer highlights the poet's use of structural techniques like enjambment to mirror the emotional weight of the work.
Why it matters
It provides critical insight into contemporary Indian English poetry and the intersection of performance art and literature.
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.
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