Aadhi Neend
(Urdu Poetry)
A Review by Naeem Baig
On a winter night, far away down in the hills, the chilled water stream runs
silently along the cedars and if someone there lights a fire in a way to stay
alive, then so, one feels, is the reading of the Ghazals and poems in Baram
Ghouri‘s poetry Book, “Aadhi Neend.”
His Ghazals are two way swords, filled with light and the same time assonant
echoes carrying a torch for his vows and lost dreams throughout the verses. Yet
they are holding the strings of hopes in the twilight and staving off darkness
through his words and cleaving for love. Baram knows about how human feelings
are often starving for words to work. He lived his major part of the life in a
caravan of Baluchistan. A man who would choose to live like that won’t write
frivolous poetry. Much is at stake here—a brightly original way of looking at
the earth and a keen craft that turns the joy and grief he feels into his words,
enhance the rhythms of Odes he chooses to portray. That’s what Baram does; he
gets the love into the language. He tells us how to suppress the grief and
uphold the internal echoes’ of his soul.
Renowned Urdu Critic Dr. Farooq Ahmad in the preface to the ‘Aadhi Neend” has
categorically described his Ghazals as part of the dawn emerging from the deep
rooted labyrinth darkness with aesthetic qualities of his inner feelings though
Baram has not used it in compressed form yet stunning words speak from his pen
with the readers.
In addition to the forms of rhyme, alliteration and rhythm that structure much
of his poetry is the style of Baram that plays a more delicate role in his even
free verses poetry in creating pleasure. Baram refers to the musical, flowing
quality of words arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way.
Baram Ghouri among his contemporaries’ walks in the corridors of Urdu literature
a step ahead of his period, as Dr. Muhammad Ali Siddiqui describes his poetry
likely to be followed a long way ahead of moments in hand.
A renowned Professor of Urdu and leading linguistic critic from Karachi
University Prof. Sahar Ansari recognises Baram’s poetic romanticism that
emphasized inspiration of the primacy of the individual. 18th Century
romanticism was a reaction against the order and restraint of classicism and
neoclassicism, and a rejection of the rationalism which characterized the
enlightenment that is perhaps conceded in Baram’s mind while he opts the
difficult way.
I personally look forward for the incredible work Baram is doing and would be
doing in the days ahead. He still got the muscle to explore his poetry as said
about Shelley “The poet’s search for himself” provided he gets through out from
his most complex research work he is engaged since last many years.
Note: Note. Reviewer is an Article Writer in Technobiz Magazine Lahore (An
international magazine in Science & Technology), and author of TRIPPING SOUL (a
fictional novel) & several Urdu Afsana & English Short Stories. Rest of his work
can be viewed at www.scribd.com