The Valley Speaks In Wani Nazir's Verse

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
The Chill in the Bones by Wani Nazir

By Rafiya Sayeed

In The Chill in the Bones, Wani Nazir gathers the dust of his homeland and turns it into poetry that aches.

This haunting collection is part lament, part tribute, part reckoning. It holds the emotional temperature of Kashmir, a place that in the poet's words is“an Eden whose Adam / has been long exiled to / uncertainty.”

Reading this book feels like stepping into a graveyard of dreams, where every poem is a headstone, but also a flower.

Nazir doesn't write about Kashmir from a distance. He is inside it, within the silence that follows rhythm, within the pages of newspapers that no longer shock, within the skin of a people still trying to remember how to feel.

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The poems are not journalistic. They are not political in a conventional sense. Yet, every line is a statement. Every metaphor is a memory.

In poems like My Poetry, Weaving a Poem, and Writing a Poem, Nazir addresses the why and how of his own writing. They're not only about the process but about the burden of speaking.

The poet doesn't“strip off the subject,” as he puts it. Instead, he embraces it, with the quiet devotion of someone tending to the bones of the past. The result is a voice that feels both intimate and unshakable.

The metaphors in the collection are striking, but they don't draw attention to themselves. They flow, often quietly, through poems that feel as natural as breath. Water, snow, ash, memory, trees-these return again and again, creating a kind of ecology of pain.

Nazir threads“beads of syllables and words” into a“garland” that floats on what he calls“a shrieking river of metaphors.”

That garland is light, bright even, but it carries the scent of grief. Grief, in these poems, is not a performance. It is something older, like weather or stone.

There is a strong undercurrent of lyrical mastery throughout the book. The rhythm of the poems holds the weight of their content. The imagery sometimes startles, but more often, it stays with you slowly, like a bruise that deepens over time.

Nazir writes with restraint, and that restraint gives the poems power. You won't find rage on the surface. But beneath the calm surface of his verse, the tremors of loss and longing never stop.

The nine ghazals in the book are a special highlight. They carry the musical melancholy one associates with Agha Shahid Ali, and yet Nazir's voice is his own.

The longing, the unresolved search, the aching desire for belonging-these are carried beautifully in the classical structure of the ghazal. The best of them, like the poems Tears and Memory, seem to rise above the page and speak directly to the reader's chest.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this collection is how accessible it is. You don't need to be a scholar of poetry or politics to be moved.

Nazir's language is simple, but never simplistic. His metaphors do not obscure meaning, they reveal it.

Kudos to the poet sounds like a cliché until you finish this book. Then you understand why it must be said.

Wani Nazir has written something that doesn't just deserve to be read. It deserves to be remembered.

Rafiya Sayeed is an educator, poet essayist, and a reviewer.

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