Book Description

Rudra Kinshuk’s Memories of Silence presents the multifarious dimensions of nature and human life in deft poetic lines. How do we see the often-enigmatic contrasts in the poet’s visual landscape? Kinshuk’s consummate art of poetry weaves a rich tapestry of images that are at once real and surreal, near and far, with a sense of nostalgia often lingering in our mind and heart. It is, as if, the sparrows in his poem weave our stories, unfurl the hidden and lost dreams of life, and transform them to motion; they “Stitch blue Over the scarecrow in the meadow near the fairground at the village Manikhar.” (‘The Song of Sparrows’) Each poem in the collection has its own candour, ‘The Bird of Ether’, ‘The Future Meet’, ‘Fragrance of Sawdust’, ‘Intimate Birds’, ‘Songs of Water’, ‘Dreams of Returning’, ‘Waiting for Zero Light’, ‘In Search of Lord Shiva’, ‘What the Moon Whispered’ have the effulgence of a serene emotion combined with the art of understanding a blissful state of liberation. With a pensive articulation of what lies beyond the horizon, Kinshuk himself becomes ‘The Lone Traveler’ at times to usher in a new, radiant living realm for us, one who realizes and yet lets us know without any stale didacticism- ‘Yet love is an enigmatic musk deer / Charmed in ephemeral fragrance.’ Memories of Silence talks about the signals in the newer frames of ‘retrospective’, as Kinshuk reflects upon the strands of life. The swift flow of a soulful tune, lines that are pregnant with possibilities to nurture the Indian soil highlight the various layers of Indian English poetry. What remains as an afterthought is the warm scent of first love, perhaps, in the quaint poetic lines: “The bird comes out of darkness, I read its silence, as if an inspiration on the shadow of a half-fallen tree holding fast to interrogation.”