In the dying light

Sombre yet alluring poems, delving deep into the last vestiges of the soul.

“ I have now set out to do the things / you loved most about me./About a gift called poetry… I have set about writing, / what you perhaps would most love me to do - / write about you,” says Gopikrishnan Kottoor. “Father”, “Wake Us”, “In Passing” (a sequence of poems that forms part of the larger collection Victoria Terminus) is a tribute to the poet's dying father.

INTENTIONS
That Kottoor should have given himself the permission to write these poems about his father as the latter lay in coma following a brain hemorrhage may be hard for some to understand. But then the poet tells us in no uncertain terms that this is just what his father would have wanted him to do, that, in fact, his father is more than just his muse-of-the-moment. In “saving” the poet's poems on his shelf “as though poems were pigeons/and needed a home,” the older man has nurtured his son's work, offering “a carving of [his] bone/to hone [his] poems upon”.

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