Selected Poems

This collection brings together, for the first time, poetry from three strikingly different phases of Joy Goswami’s formidable literary career — Surjo-Pora Chhai (Ashes, Burnt by the Sun, 1999), Moutat Moheshwar (Shiva, My High, 2005) and Du Dondo Phowara Matro (Merely a Spurt of Time, 2011). Selected and translated by Sampurna Chatterji, this book, which includes an in-depth interview with the poet, introduces the English reader to the world of a poet whose language is powerful, inventive and often enigmatic. While some poems invoke a landscape that is ‘mysterious, anguished and visionary’, in others Joy Goswami achieves mischief and melancholy with the deftest of strokes.