The Story of Bones and other Poems is a book of verse by Kamal Chowdhury, a poet of the 70s. The poems in this book have been selected from poems published by him during the last three decades. Kamal Chowdhury as a poet evinces a few characteristics that make him stand out among him contemporaries. He builds on the familiar, but in the process the familiar is made to disintegrate and yield to the claims of the new associations he creates for the reader to discover their new moorings in an uncharted territory of emotive language. Kamal Projects a persona, the first person who is elusive and difficult to pin down. While in his early poems the I is fairly easily recognisable as the poet himself, in his later, particularly longer poems, the projected persona takes a myriad of veiled identities. This careful craftsmanship and skilful manipulation of the `speaker' take on a broader, more ambivalent attitude in his longer poems.
Kamal has attained an exalted height. He has still a long way to go. This translation, Hopefully, will help him find a global audience.
