The New Frontier & Other Odds and Ends in Verse and Prose
Poetry
Kaiser Haq
Blurb:
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.
Bio:
Kaiser Haq s a Bangladeshi poet, essayist, translator and professor of English. After 41 years at Dhaka University he joined the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), where he is Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities. Educated at the universities of Dhaka (BA Honours and MA) and Warwick (PhD as a Commonwealth Scholar), he was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and Vilas Fellow at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at SOAS, Café Poet at the Poetry Café of the Poetry Society, and a resident at Les Recollets.
Haq has won the Bangla Academy Prize for Translation, the Sherwin W. Howard Poetry Award from Weber—the Contemporary West, and the Distinguished Achievement Award for Creative Writing from the South Asian Literary Association (SALA). An independence war veteran, Haq is married, with a daughter.