In April 2023, an exhibition of photographs titled In a Cannibal Time by the publisher, poet and photographer Naveen Kishore opened in Kolkata. Curated by the poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote, the exhibition, in fact, comprised four collections of Kishore’s work – The Epic and the Elusive (1997), Performing the Goddess (1999), The Greenroom of the Goddess (2003) and the titular collection from 2002. In his curatorial note, Hoskote wrote: “The mandate of testimony, the urgency of bearing witness to ideologically fraught and emotionally demanding histories, is central to his (Kishore’s) work.”This urgency is, perhaps, nowhere more evident than the collection titled In a Cannibal Time. A similar urgency informs Kishore’s third collection of poetry, Ode to a Grieving Angel (Speaking Tiger, May 2026).In an untitled poem, like all the poems in the book, from its third section, the readers are cast into a dramatic scene of a fallen – or falling – angel: “disfigured / plaster / peeling / strips / leprous shadows / beneath bricks / crumbling / dust of years / saying nothing / hearing / less / stymied / prevented / from saying / anything / not a word”. Each line in the poem comprises barely a word or two, creating a staccato rhythm, which, in turn, is like photography, capturing action like a montage or an action-shot.Ode to a Grieving Angel by Naveen Kishore (Speaking Tiger, May 2026).The rhythm of the poem, however, is not the only visual trigger; the manner in which the words are organised on the white space of two consecutive pages also evoke a fall. The poem ends on the second page with a dramatic image: “white / as a sheet / she lay / in the dark / a wounded bird stuck in her throat”. The image of the fallen angel, lying stupefied in the dark, evidently owes a debt to John Milton’s The Paradise Lost. But it is also a double image, captured like a photograph through double exposure: Two winged creatures, angel and bird, wounded and embroiled with each other. The manner in which Kishore combines his skills in poetry, photography and theatre is unequivocally radical and interdisciplinary.Kishore’s work in theatre is, perhaps, a little less known than his pioneering efforts as a publisher, his photography – and now, his poetry. In a 2022 interview with the writer Jerry Pinto, Kishore revealed how he was told to work backstage while auditioning for a play in Kolkata; it “turned out to be a blessing.” He discovered he was good at theatre lighting and was also paid for it (unlike other jobs in amateur theatre).“I taught myself the art of lighting the air around actors,” adds Kishore. “The atmosphere made palpable and the actors making their way in and out of light.” He also co-edited the Seagull Theatre Quarterly journal from 1994 to 2003, and his photography collection, The Epic and the Elusive, originally done for the journal, captured “moments of Manipuri theatre during the political turbulence of the 1990s”. It is another of Kishore’s projects infused with the urgency of “bearing witness”.His experience as a light designer is manifest in this book, which is, in fact, an extended script for a performance. The long poem opening the first section has several Shakespearean performances – Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear – taking place simultaneously or in a quick succession. The lines narrating the performance are punctuated by terse, italicised notes (possibly for a light designer): “blackout”, “enter Macbeth”, “enter Lear”, “an actor prepares”, “pause”, “a scream”, etc.It is a dense poem, made challenging by intertextual references to other literary and artistic works. But the narrator asserts that instead of trying to decode the words, the reader must be patient, because “meaning will rise / like a phoenix / between the lines”. It’s a hopeful note, struck cautiously, because language itself seems to be withering away in the poem (“fearing / the death of language”).This fear of “the death of language” is embodied in the titular image of the “grieving angel”. (Besides the title, the words appear together only in one line of the opening poem: “a grieving angel drags along her wings”.) The title is, at least for me, a reference to the statue of Angel of Grief, by the 19th-century American sculptor William Wetmore Story, which can be seen at the Protestant cemetery in Rome, over a grave its maker shares with his wife. “Angels are aplenty in graveyards, symbolically linking heaven and earth,” writes English journalist Peter Stanford, describing the sculpture, “but this… figure speaks more of the pain of those left behind.” In the context of Kishore’s book, the grieving angel is overcome with exhaustion for the troubled world to which they bear witness.The angel is also, however, a poet. In a poem from the fourth section, Kishore’s narrator tells us: “The poet is a grieving being.” She is cursed to be both grieving to the point of exhaustion and yet having “no choice but to pour over and find vocabulary”.The poet as the rebellious and fallen angel has a long legacy in poetry. I have already shown the influence of Milton’s Lucifer on Kishore’s grieving angel. But there is another fallen divine figure to which it refers – Prometheus. Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to humans, but for this transgression, Zeus binds him to the side of a mountain and tortures him for centuries. Prometheus’s myth was reinterpreted in the early 19th century by Romantic poet P.B. Shelley in Prometheus Unbound, reflecting the contemporary revolutionary turmoil.Prometheus bears a striking resemblance to Milton’s Satan and has been described as a metonym for a revolutionary poet. Kishore’s fallen angel, too, is a revolutionary poet in this tradition. Like the photographer finds himself compelled to bear witness, whether to Gujarat in 2002 or Manipur in the previous decade, or the current turmoil in our world, the poet, too, bears witness, builds an archive. This archive is staged in the pages of this book. The drama is a deliberate strategy to shake the reader out of their torpor and bear witness, like the poet and the photographer. Archiving and witnessing, too, it seems to claim, can be radical acts in our illiberal times.Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist.