Man Of Glass

Man of Glass is the first collection of poems by Tabish Khair in a decade, following the critically acclaimed Where Parallel Lines Meet (2000). In the three sections of this new collection, Khair draws upon three writers from across centuries, cultures, literary genres and languages: Kalidasa and his fifth-century Sanskrit play The Recognition of Shakuntala, Asadullah Khan Ghalib and his early nineteenth-century Urdu ghazals, and H.C. Andersen and his Danish ‘fairy tales’. All three are united not only by Khair’s chosen language of creativity, English, but also by a concern with reflecting about life and loss, identity and indoctrination, humanity and divinity, and the nature of things and being. Drawing subtly upon the past, Khair engages powerfully and movingly with many issues and events, particular and perennial, of vital concern to the reader today: immigration, Afghanistan, terror, love, loss, death, human duplicity, faith, prejudice, the Iraq War, genocide…