ABSTRACT
The bee flitting from flower to flower. Self moving from youth to old age. The tenant moving from house to house. The un-answered questions travelling from epoch to epoch … Such images of evanescence are the stuff of the poetry of K S Narasimha Swamy, one of the most loved and lovable of Kannada poets, who is now no more with us. Unlike his immediate predecessors in Kannada poetry such as Bendre, Kuvempu and Pu Ti Narasimhachar, KSNa, as he was referred to by the lovers of his incomparable poetry, never donned prophetic robes. The clarity and simplicity of KSNa’s poetry was hard-won. As a poet he had forged his idiom through a deep understanding of his favourite masters m Sanskrit, Kannada and English. To say that KSNa celebrated the ordinary does not mean that there was anything commonplace about his poetry. Far from it. He had the unusual genius of uncovering the extra-ordinary side of the ordinary.
