‘The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind’: A landscape of feelings in Avinash Shrestha’s poetry

Final as marble
your absence will sadden other afternoons.

Avinash Shrestha’s collection of poetry The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind translated from the Nepali into English by Rohan Chhetri evokes a landscape of feelings that translates the outside/outer into the inside/inner.

The very first poem, “Relative”, is a vertigo of paradoxes. The mountain cliffs appear “more beautiful” than flowers, thorns appear “more sorrowful” than colours, the heart is “higher” than butterflies and birds, and suddenly, before you realise it, the poet is caught in the folds between night and darkness. The passing of time registers the landscape of experience.

In the poem “Metamorphosis”, Shrestha transforms into a sea after waking up from the arms of a river. He spent the night as a caterpillar to be transformed into a butterfly in the afternoon. A feather waiting to be a bird, a seed waiting to give birth to a god, the poet is only briefly being what he is, always looking to become something else.

In the poem, “Greed”, someone or something seek-able is lodged in the recesses of the heart. The poet is led by paths that impersonate the sought-after object, trailed by many deaths, in the hope of a meeting. The object “you” may not be...

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