Language rebels against its dissolution in Naveen Kishore’s ‘Ode to a Grieving Angel’

(Photo: Speaking Tiger/ Express File)

3 min readAug 16, 2026 10:29 AM IST

First published on: Aug 16, 2026 at 10:29 AM IST

The lights change from crimson to steel blue and a fallen angel drags his tattered wings across the stage: A foggy barren landscape of burnt stumps and a jaundiced cardboard moon as the ghost of Hamlet’s father shuffles past, Macbeth lies on a stone slab, Lear is silhouetted against a darkening horizon. It is this grief-stricken world of rebels, tried without a trial, expelled and subjected to water cannons, that Naveen Kishore invites us to inhabit in his latest poetry collection, Ode to a Grieving Angel. If the imagery hits home, Kishore has done his job as a chronicler of our age of war, censorship and state violence, where poems die on tongues, “fighting for air.”This theatre of collapse where meaning and language have disintegrated is carefully constructed through typography and fragmented, jagged verses punctuated by prose, stage directions and a Coda. Kishore, who distills his years as a theatre lighting designer and photographer, to set up a stage, where language, memory and the angelic figure of the poet are broken and cradled in the same breath. On this stage, the alphabet is a cast of fugitives, coming “unstuck/ from its even-keeled moorings”, and the writer’s muse rages “in a voice that has lost its memory.” Everything — language, the world as we know it — is disintegrating as the poet struggles to write a eulogy, and the actor struggles to collect the words strewn over the stage.