Joy Goswami: Selected Poems

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press

Joy Goswami is probably the most highly regarded Bengali poet today, a worthy successor, in a land of poets, to Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. Although his life has never been easy, his vocation as a poet has never been in doubt. The quality of Goswami’s prolific output has been widely acknowledged in West Bengal and India.

Goswami’s poems are fierce-in their expression, in the impact of their juxtaposed images, and in the effect that the images have one on another. The poems possess immediacy, drawing readers pell-mell into the essential tensions and delighting in the magic of metamorphoses.

Although readers might easily allow themselves to float on Goswami’s crisscrossing images, savor them on second reading, and linger with his crisp and penetrant words, they are quickly brought up short by meaning, for Goswami’s words are not just words but penetrating markers of sense. His metier is to cut through to the center of our emotional universe. Goswami has written more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose; this is the first American publication of his poems.