Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. This is a collection of poetry by 38 contemporary Bangladeshi poets, selected and translated by Hassanal Abdullah, made possible (in part) with a grant from the Queens Council on the Art with public funds from the New York City Council of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Poets include Humayun Azad, Rafiq Azad, Nirmalendu Goon, Saheed Quaderi, Shamsur Rahman, Naznin Seamon, et al.
This thoughtful sensitive, and well-balanced collection presents a full range of contemporary Bengali poetry from the most famous authors to emerging voices. All share not only a sense of form and evocative language, but also the tragic history that has shaped their outcries and imagination. Through the lens of suffering, the poets have salvaged elements of beauty and moments of comedy. This is a beautiful collection to be savored from its panorama of Bangladeshi poetry made accessible through an elegant English translation.--Joan Digby Although there was great modern poetry in, say, Arabic (Kahil Gibran) and Urdu (Mohaamed Ibal), there was not an organized modernism in the Arab world or in the rest of British-ruled India as there was in Bengal. This make Bangladeshi potmodernism different from poetry written in Middle Eastern or South Asian in a postmodern time...Hassanal Abullah, who leads multiple lives as a poet, teacher, and political and civil-right activist...has here produced poems in English that yet give us the glorious past fifty years of achievement in Bangladeshi poetry.--Nicholas Birns
