Tears and Poems
Major Saroar Imran Mahmood (Retd)
Dear readers I want to share some lines from the book "Tears and Poems"
The beginning poem of the book is- Trance.
Last night I had a dream
I was transported to the land
Where there is beauty and bliss
And a crystal stream
It is conventional, though not very logical, Modern Bangladeshi Poetry has already acquired a rich cornucopian legacy and the modernist tradition in Bangla poetry which go back to the decades of the 20th century. Pessimism, the sense of emptiness and desolation and the Sisyphean futility of life which have imparted all the creative verve and aesthetic excellence of Bangladeshi poetry and all modern poetry for that matter, had already become dominant themes. Major Saroar Imran Mahmood fulfils the requirement of poetry by being a pessimist but he barely qualifies on the score, since his pessimism is of a milder kind compared to that of some of his predecessors who exploited this theme of the full.
Though a pessimist he also writes of dreams and dreams- fields of crops and destiny and some distant golden Millennium. Even then Saroar's poetry amply possesses other features, of modernity like allusiveness, asymmetry, occasional use of unfamiliar diction, creation of contrasting moods, and a general atmosphere of tedium and fatigue. magic realism and anti-poetry are two of his distinctive elements.
Major Saroar has proved himself to be an able successor of the postmodernist Bangladeshi English poetry.
Lastly, I want to share some fabulous lines from the excellent collection of poems-
As we grow Older
We lose our innocence
As we climb up the ladder
We remain tense.
(Silent Cargo)
Rezauddin Stalin
Poet of Bangladesh.