Breath of Bengal (Paperback)

by Hassan Al Abdullah (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
...inspires with its crafted imagery and gentle narratives. Hassan Al Abdullah unselfishly shares his own pilgrimage with the reader... -- Mindy Kronenberg, Book Mark, Spring 2001

...to the poetry of Tagore and Nazrul, of which he[Hassan Al Abdullah] is a considerable continuation. -- Stanley H. Barkan, Shabdaguchha, Oct-Dec 2001

In Mr. Abdullah's world, even the ants are afraid to go home. But there are compensations-moments... -- Robert Dunn, Shabdaweb, Jan-march 2001

Product Description
Breath of Bengal is a bilingual(Bengali and English) collection of poetry. It includes twenty poems originally written in Bengali by the poet Hassan Al Abdullah and translated by the London based poet and translator Nazrul Islam Naz.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 48 pages
• Publisher: Cross-Cultural Communications (August 30, 2000)
• ISBN-10: 0893042692
• ISBN-13: 978-0893042691
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,015,112 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Versatile, vigorous, and vivifying , January 11, 2008

By	Nicholas Birns (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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."