Knotted Grief - Poems by Naveen Kishore

In his first book of poems, renowned publisher Naveen Kishore shows us without holding back, and yet with compassion - grief, deep and bewildering; cruelties, public and private. He lays bare the nature of our outer and inner realities, using striking symbolism to reveal what humans are capable of doing to each other. The early part of the collection, ‘Kashmiriyat’, is a visceral monument to shadows, widows and unlived lives, constructed with one hundred and five stanzas. In the ‘selected griefs’ that follow, the wounds are intimate, everyday, but the images remind us of the world’s brutalities?and what, then, is innocent? By depicting large-scale human tragedies and familiar habits and hurts within the same covers, the poet tests himself, and us.

Naveen Kishore is the founder and managing director of Seagull Books in Kolkata. With registered offices in London and New York, Seagull is established in the international publishing world like no other Indian publishing house. Kishore is led not by the market, but by personal convictions and passions. By launching the “German List” book series, he has greatly enhanced the position of German-language literature in the English language not only in India but worldwide.

Ranjit Hoskote is a leading Anglophone Indian poet, and has also been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism. His books include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), and Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018). His poetry has appeared in German translation as Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006) and Feldnotizen des Magiers (Editions Offenes Feld, 2015). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). Hoskote was a Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, and has been writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Munich; Theater der Welt, Essen-Mülheim; and the Polish Institute, Berlin. He has been researcher-in-residence at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. He has received the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award for Translation, and the S H Raza Award for Literature. Hoskote was juror for international literature for the 2015-2017 fellowship cycle at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.

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