Bottom Less Hourglass

The Bottomless Hourglassis a collection of poems by young emerging Kashmiri poet Aamina Hamid. With the emergence of young voices in art, culture,literature, Aamina symbolises the young Kashmiri youth self-made and self-taught making their mark for times to come. This cartography of mind is charted through a collection of 103 prose poems. While giving the poet liberty to ?irt with language and ideas, the poems de?nitely steer away from being prosaic. Aamina, not only reinvents but re-inverts the traditional metaphors to create breathtaking new turns of language and ideas. Does the candle spend itself or does the darkness prey on its light? What do we exactly “mourn” when we mourn others? The loved one or the loss of self that sel?shly clings to the loved one?How can fate be reversed when it is not written by a grand feather pen with ink that can be washed by water but when it is written by the stubborn ink of a not-so-fancy ball point pen?The Bottomless Hourglassattempts to dabble with such and many more questions. The very title of the collection is symbolic as time has ceased to slip us by. The real horror is to feel ourselves trapped in this column of time with nothing slipping by but being looped eternally and helplessly. The collection helps us taste the raw taste of blood, the insanely unruly nerves, the shame of facing those we love while we fail ourselves. It speaks about loss, love and struggle to exist-the timeless issues of humanity in a language which is the poets own (and de?nitely owned). The imagery is the poet’s personal revelation of self and we are caught in the maze of poetry that demands something essential from our wavering attention spans and a screen consumed mind. We ?nd the poet herself, the poets (like Ghalib pleasantly), ourselves, our not so selves in the cracks between the lines; the missing hyphens; the gaps in thoughts; and the blurring pictures.