Selected Poems: Joy Goswami

This collection brings together, for the first time, poetry from three strikingly different phases of Joy Goswami’s formidable literary career – Ashes, burnt by the sun (Surjo-Pora Chhai, 1999), Shiva, my high (Moutat Moheshwar, 2005) and Merely a Spurt of Time (Du Dondo Phowara Matro, 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.