This new collection from the doyen of Bangladeshi poets in English brings together his recent work in three genres – poetry, essay and fiction. There are fifteen original poems, of which the title poem is the longest he has written to date. It presents a startlingly fresh take on climate change, and is followed by a companion essay that will stimulate the reader’s critical faculty. Haq’s characteristic wit and mastery of image and idiom and his sharp eye for the quirkiness of life are evident throughout.
His imagination, freewheeling through our crisis-ridden world, also comes up with flashes of meta-poetic observations. Haq’s translation of Kazi Nazrul Islam’s ebullient masterpiece, “Bidrohi” (“The Rebel”) is a tour de force, as is his piquant revisionary version of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. If these are “odds and ends”, as the subtitle puts it, they nonetheless add up to an engaging contribution to contemporary world literature.