Poetry
সারা দুপুর
Not translated into English
Ahsan Habib · 1964
Synopsis
Poems in which the poet, in a restrained voice, moves from himself to the world. In “Uttirno proharer gan”, he speaks of his solitude, on an evening of sadness, before a dead river and a landing stage with its lights out; “Putul” follows a woman who was called a doll and who, in the sun of an autumn afternoon, gathers ears of rice, until she becomes the queen of her own life; “Tara dujon” is a love poem through which passes the fire that burned Troy, and “Prajna baniker prarthana” awaits the day when the world will be lit.
Context
The collection appeared in 1964, two years after the previous one, in the years of East Pakistan. It is on the basis of these books that critics have made the author a poet of the low voice: Humayun Malik links this restraint, for which “Putul” serves him as an example, to a choice of measure rather than to indifference. Tuhin Wadud notes that the collection widens the poet's gaze to the whole world, and the author himself said that the curse of classes, the artifice of bourgeois life and the torment of an uprooted youth were the subjects of all his poetry.
Who it is for
Short poems, measured in tone, in which the city mingles with the rice fields, the bamboo groves and the rivers of the poet's childhood.
Prizes and reception
The collection won its author the Adamjee Prize in 1964, and a Bangladeshi school guide gives it as his best book of poems.