The Bangladeshi-American poet Hassanal Abdullah is well-known as an editor and anthologist; this volume reveals his considerable strengths as a poet. Abdullah at once manages to maintain a Romantic confidence in the imagination, a modernist irony as to the imagination's limits, and a postmodern sense of the imagination as a construct. "With A Little Cash" anatomizes the tensions between art and commerce and suggests that even the avant-garde conceptions of the artists straddle this line more than their official rhetoric would have us believe. "Poetry, Come Back' begins, with mock plaintiveness, "Poetry, poetry, why have you deserted me" but, for all its whimsy and raillery, ends up with an affirmative sense of what poetry can mean to a poet--and reader--that is all the more valuable for being dearly won from within self-consciousness. "Pandora At The Mailbox" similarly succeeds in summoning a jaunty, highly contemporary, yet, beneath it all, reverent sense of what the poetic can be. There are comic poems ("Rajendra College"), poems of observation ("The Story of Ants") , and meditative poems of deep feeling ("Grey Affliction", the particularly fine, and stoically emotional, "Colorless Night"). Although as an editor Abdullah is passionately involved in the politics of his native Bangladesh, the most political poem in this volume, "I, Too, Am A Revolutionary," forthrightly assays racial tensions in the United States and takes a firm stand on behalf of the subordinated and overlooked. This slim volume (with the Bengali originals on facing pages with the English translations by Nazrul Islam Naz) displays, within a short compass, the wide range of expression, and the zestful idiosyncratic enunciation of such, of which this still-emerging poet is capable. He can well say, as he does in "The Light of the Earth" : "I've tasted all the flavors of this world/Time gave it tome and made them crazy indeed."
--Nicholas Birns
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Sign the Petition : Release the Arrested University Teachers Immediately : An Appeal to the Caretaker Government of Bangladesh
http://www.mukto-mona.com/human_rights/university_teachers_arrest.htm
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Daily Star publishes an interview with Mukto-Mona
http://www.mukto-mona.com/news/daily_star/daily_star_MM.pdf
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MM site is blocked in Islamic countries such as UAE. Members of those theocratic states, kindly use any proxy (such as http://proxy.org/) to access mukto-mona.
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Mukto-Mona Celebrates 5th Anniversary
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/5_yrs_anniv/index.htm
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Mukto-Mona Celebrates Earth Day:
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/Earth_day2006/index.htm
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Kansat Uprising : A Special Page from Mukto-Mona
http://www.mukto-mona.com/human_rights/kansat2006/members/
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MM Project : Grand assembly of local freedom fighters at Raumari
http://www.mukto-mona.com/project/Roumari/freedom_fighters_union300306.htm
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German Bangla Radio Interviews Mukto-Mona Members:
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/Darwin_day/german_radio/
Mukto-Mona Celebrates Darwin Day:
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/Darwin_day/index.htm
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Some FAQ's about Mukto-Mona:
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VISIT MUKTO-MONA WEB-SITE : http://www.mukto-mona.com/
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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
-Beatrice Hall [pseudonym: S.G. Tallentyre], 190
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