Joy Goswami

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star PressJoy Goswami is probably the most highly regarded Bengali poet today, a worthy successor - in a land of poets - to Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. His life has never been easy, but from early on the poet's vocation has been his. Joy has been prolific, and has been widely recognized in West Bengal and India. Joy's poems are fierce - in their expression, in the impact of their juxtaposed images, in the effect the images have one on another. The poems possess immediacy; the reader is drawn pell-mell into the essential tensions. Goswami's poems delight in the magic of metamorphoses.One could just float on Goswami's criss-crossing images, savor them on second reading, and hear his crisp and penetrant words. But then one is brought up by meaning - for Joy's words are not just words but make sense. We know, for that is his metier, that their meaning cuts the poet. And cuts through to the center our emotional universe.Goswami has written over 30 volumes of poetry and prose; this is the first American publication of his poems, by experienced Indian and American translators, with an introduction by Roald Hoffmann, a distinguished chemist and poet.