The product of over four decades of involvement with the craft of writing, this volume will acquaint readers with the full range of Kaiser Haq’s poetic achievement to date. The earliest piece is a prose poem written when he was in high school and in its brutal honesty already hints at what was to follow. There are substantial selections from Haq’s debut collections, Starting Lines and A Little Ado, both published in 1978, the three subsequent collections in their entirety, the new poems added to Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems 1968-2006, and a sizeable number of more recent poems. An appendix provides Haq’s personal credo, “An Apology for Bangladeshi Poetry in English.”
Haq’s poetry is rich in emotional content and intellectual implications while being at once, ironic, quirky, zany. He has an eye for the telling image and an ear for the musical phrase. Almost all his poems are rooted in life in his native corner of the planet, but their appeal is universal.
