Across the pages of Knife of the Tide, his collection of masterfully wrought sonnets set across borders, landscapes and different stages of selfhood, poet Adrian Husain becomes a kind of cultural cartographer, mapping fault lines and past high points, decay and reinvention.
The book is divided into four distinct sections. The opening section, The Severing, is situated at the fraught intersection of childhood and the Partition of the Subcontinent, where violence is not merely episodic but a pervasive element shaping lifelong perceptions. The second section, Lapsed Narratives, is concerned with the processing of those cataclysmic events over time. The third section, What Images Return, O My Daughter, ranges more widely across time and geography, while the final section, Post Res Perditas, eulogises not just personal acquaintances but also historical figures like General Soleimani or Liaquat Ali Khan, “that elect of history waiting,” who is then shown “crumpling—speak/and will speak again—through the blood we reap.”
At a time when free verse has become the default idiom, choosing to write sonnets may seem anachronistic, yet clearly, when handled with the assurance of someone adept at their craft, structure manages to amplify feeling. Husain employs the sonnet’s frame as a secure space for sweeping themes and sprawling landscapes as well as fragmented and occasionally fractured memories: “That haste’s long over, sails/ furled, put by, that time become legend./ It is all one. Another day’s at hand./ The present looms—the past is contraband”
Starting with a youthful narrator, the collection uses a child’s sensorial logic to navigate loss, where even violence is processed through intimate domestic wonder
This ability to bind contemporary experience to inherited poetic tradition enables the poet to enter taxing emotional terrain, direction firmly mapped out. Moreover, the sonnet’s recurring patterns stand as a counterpoint to the sense of dislocation produced by constant movement and journeys—“a hunger abounds/ripples grow to waves. I am all sound.”
Partition, that dislocation of families forced to abandon ancestral lands, heirlooms and a whole way of life, is sorely missing in poetic form, a gap that the first two sections of Knife of the Tide directly address. Whether it is an aunt, living, in isolated splendour with the aftermath of the “severing” or small moments carrying sizable meaning, “a moment came in a melee when/faint spirals of smoke were seen in front, rising unabashed.”
The fact of Partition, Husain reminds us, defies the conventional binary of war and peace. The displacement it produced was total and irreversible, making immigrants out of millions, through the abrupt rewriting of borders. While the immigrant experience in general has richly fed the literary canon, this particular migration has been denied comparable recognition, despite its effects being especially profound and requiring much-needed closure. “We barely packed. The clothes I wore/were all I took.”
The book is essentially an extended rumination on how the stories we tell about ourselves are always subject to change. Memory here behaves much like a landscape shaped by erosion and deposition at the hands of the elements over time. Just as no coastline or rock ever reaches a final form, the past, too, is continually recontoured, given meaning and re-meaning by the present moment. Throughout the collection, Husain shows us how the past is a living, breathing entity, never absolute, always in flux.
Distance, too, acquires divergent connotations across the collection. In the later sections it is often geographical, in measurable spans of travel and relocation, from “a city sculpted from rock” to when the poet finds himself “speeding past the sea.” In the opening sonnets, however, distance isn’t expansive in terms of kilometres but sweeping in consequence—Partition imposing, through an imagined line, a distance between one way of life and another, with more finality than any oceans crossed subsequently.
The poet’s self-awareness is particularly notable. Like how, without anyone else having to point it out, he knows “all that wandering—without moving—it made little sense.” Husain is acutely conscious that what he recalls may not be factual, but the tricks of memory. Crucially, his is not the rose-tinted variety of nostalgia. Even when beauty is apprehended, he is aware of how it may be beauty conferred retrospectively rather than inherent in the moment itself: “Though there was much noise while you were there,” “how quietly/ladylike you went—like a sea breeze.” The past is subjected to a kind of clinical attention, excised from its circumstances and examined without the intoxication of sentimentality, thus creating an awareness of the poet’s position in the larger scheme of things: “Latecomer/to history, I wait—innocent of regret.”
The collection begins with a child’s perspective, the narrator’s voice unmistakably youthful and establishing from the very first sonnet the child’s gaze as sensorial while already containing the seed of later loss. Perception is governed not by history or violence but by intimate, domestic wonder—“breakfast and an egg, the yolk, tapped open—a sacrilege waited for—and lost in its flow, sunset spilt across a plate.” Even transience is apprehended through the child’s logic rather than as overt trauma; “despite all, the moment, gone, lives—yellow and white.” This is admirably sustained as the collection progresses, so that the physical child gradually becomes the inner child: subsequent voyages, too, are recalled through this same consciousness, when “my two sea journeys become one, then crack/open.” There is growth, certainly, but the sense of wonder is never wholly extinguished.
Crucially, however, Husain’s does not present the child’s perspective as a softening lens. Against popular assumptions that childhood innocence cushions pain, the collection suggests the opposite: when adult-scale violence collides with a child’s underdeveloped nervous system, the resulting devastation is intensified rather than diminished. This unease surfaces obliquely in images such as “grim iron spirals, empty forecourt” or “sofas lay like abandoned ships / in harbour in the drawing room,” before erupting more shockingly in moments of explicit brutality: “my pet dove carried away by a mongoose…feathers scattered and eyes gouged out.”
The collection is also remarkable for juxtaposing overtly political themes with images of arresting beauty and lush lyricism, from “a leaf in passage to the ground… already in the past, falling a mere ceremony,” to when beauty is ascribed to the mundane, “an everyday/happening but magicked with colour, with high/and low-lights.” Equally lush are descriptions such as “dawn breaking from dark / with its particular chaos,” to cherished memories rendered as “a hoarded redolence” or “music escaping to its own purer home.”
Also worth noting is how the poet does not merely recall his own past but connects with the memories and experiences of those he has never met. The sonnet Swan Lake: Marta González captures the astonishing, fleeting return of memory to the Spanish ballerina stricken with Alzheimer’s yet responding for a few magical moments to the music of Swan Lake as her “withered arms lift/ to their own recall, drop, lift again/ filled suddenly with life, shudder, morph to wings.”
There is, too, some strikingly inventive turn of phrase: “the school for the blind/down the lane remains unseeing,” or when he recalls an “orphaned time” and in the very next line recalls living with “near-strangers” whom he also refers to as “rare masks of family” each phrase giving us a glimpse into a world of complexity. In the eulogy for his uncle, Husain recalls a “mothering grace,” a term that defies gendered expectations to recognise mothering, and hence the mother, not as a noun but a verb.
For a collection that is at its heart a conversation between memory and the self, one might have expected a neat or rousing conclusion, yet Husain pointedly resists this. This refusal to provide definite answers, inviting the reader, instead, into a shared space of curiosity and wonder, is the hallmark of enduring poetry. In the final sonnet “Rose” he asks whether “the world—sky cloud— merely a thing recalled, an elevated/ revenant, a redolence held on to,” or whether the familiar sights of “twilight lane, trellised tree” are “all there but as a trick of memory.”
In conclusion, Knife of the Tide is most remarkable for its multitudes. Yes, there is structure, a unifying vision and even an ordered account, but there is also an ethereal, timeless and layered quality to the book which makes it a treat for lovers of poetry.