Atif Khurshid wani
Book:Tears fall in my heart
Author:Adnan shafi
Reviewed By: Atif Khurshid Wani
Poetry is a bliss in the form words. It bridges the gap, unites the people and blends the souls across the length and breadth. Born in an alluring and appealing valley of Kashmir, Adnan shafi, is bestowed with a divine pen, daring heart, unblenching mind, gallant voice supported by his radiant vocabulary. Adnan tried to interlace people across the world with his debut collection of 105 poems ‘Tears fall in my heart’. The eloquent expression of his ideas that are woven around the graceful natural symmetry of Kashmir and at the same time whirling around the notions of disgrace and cruelty that people have dwelled with. The stimulating art of his poetry here is driven by his brilliance with regard to setting the readers in motion with an amazing and typical natural poem, ‘winter’. Here is a verse from his poem: The eerie whistle of snowflakes dropping to the ground pierced my heart. Adnan makes his readers dive into his dynamic expressions with the stunning use of images, metaphors and similies. Starting with the winter and snow is an apt way of setting the tone for the readers. With remarkable delicacy and articulation the poet reminds the realm of scars to his readers. Down to the memory lane of his deep and invisible scars he makes the heart beat faster with tear jerking verses while speaking about the plight, suffering and adversity of every Kashmiri as here:
The scars are there reminding me
of those plights that bore them
in my innocence
Espying them,
make me feel
a responsible person in my being.
The wistful use of expressions powered by the concise images is prevalent in Adnan’s eloquent poetry. Dwelling in the land entrusted with tranquillity and quietness Adnan finds himself as empty and perplexed in the chilly October breeze longing to catch a glimpse of his pious beloved.With a whiff of conflict and tug of war all around, the poet recollects the struggles of his heart before his companion. He screws his friend to pierce his left side of the chest with long nails to unravel the tangles in poet’s heart. Beautiful but heart wrenching images of circulating ‘Blood’ as flowing red and ‘Death as pale white propel the reader’s heart to stop a while for the sheer sensation of death as:
Make me bleed and open
all the streams of flowing red,
Make me turn pale white.
The verses from the poem ‘I am the corpse’ carry a huge burden on humanity being the spectators of the long unrest. The poet here wonderfully played with the use of metaphors like ‘Burning sun’ and ‘Burning soul’ besides adding the spices of arduous similies of, ‘Like a dying star’ and ‘Like sun burning off the fog’. The complaints put forth by the poet are evocative and reproachful by stressing out on the broken legs of the half-grown birds. However, the poet here doesn’t run away from the sense of hope and belief. He over again puts an emphasis on the optimism before his readers but the hollow dark tunnel never reached to the light of pacifism.
I don’t lose hope,
Yet, they remind me
I m still alive.
The poet in some of his effortlessly inferred poems puts an exhortation of danger, pain and apathy before his readers. The poet in his poem ‘Caged in thoughts’ is highly upset for unable to express his range of vision to his beloved.Deep within the struggling life ,I find poet lost in the shadows of love and speculations of hate.He is unable to clean-cut his voice whom he wants to address. The words in writing seem to be only tool that poet wants to use his express himself in daze. “I am still the same me”, the poem wherein poet urges the addressee to show some credence towards the poet. He may have transformed physically but he still is plunged into sorrows of life which has made him the hostage of isolation on that lost island. As a reader, I felt poet down in the dumps, low spirited and sick at heart with no impulsion or eagerness to reinvent himself in the last verses of the same poem. In between the vibrant melancholy of dejection, the poet is lost in the woods producing a replica of questions one after the other. While addressing his tragedies poet finds himself dwelling in two forms of contrasting nature.
The poet
Dwells the two lives,
Outside and
in his mind.
The poet after being reminiscent about his childhood doesn’t forget to mention the human ending. He made my heart shiver and body to sweat with his poem ‘Grave’. While seeking forgiveness in the poem, ‘The hymn of God’ he feels down to earth after recollecting the awful sins that we all commit day in and day out. As a reader of exactly poet’s age I reckon the message he portrayed is divine, everlasting and immortal for people in general and youth in particular. The feel of being lonely in the grave giving wobbly stammering answers to the known questions made me obliterate this living world. Genuinely writing, after reading Adnan’s poems about ‘Death’ and ‘Grave’, I find myself as that solitary Cuckoo bird who is just evading and escaping death while feeling the same is around. I am literally drowned between the rhythms and verses of this poignant poet. Here are some verses from his poem, ‘Broken wings’:
I am broken and rendered unfit
to lift my being;
In this callous and rampant
state of mine.
I have Left everything
immaculated;
Yet, am full as a goog
with wretchedness,
hatred, misfortune.
Keeping the poetry mystery and magicof the poet aside,I must hand a boquet of toasts with a pat on poet’s back for composing such a noteworthy contemporary works. However, people at a glance may be still judging, but I would recommend every poetry lover to turn the page and find how elegantly the poetry of divinity and sancity is written. My unambiguous and unequivocal tribute to its Author and his readers.
(The author is a freelancer. Views are his own, [email protected])
