"A Stylized Motif of Eagle Wings Woven": The Selected Poems of Zulfikar Ghose

Abstract

with his family to Bombay in 1942 and to England following Partition. His first book of poems appeared in London in 1964, and he became well known as a poet from Pakistan. In quick succession came short stories, novels, and an autobiography, as well as journalism and other writings. By time he left England for United States in 1969, he was already a writer to reckon with in several genres. Although during last twenty-five years his fiction list has come to dominate publishers' charts and reviewers' prime slots, he remains a writer who has practiced poetry consistently since late 1950s, when his early poems began to be published in British magazines. Ever since, his poems have appeared regularly in magazines, anthologies, textbooks, broadcasts, and individual collections. Over years Pakistani magazines and anthologies have also carried some of his work, though hardly any of his books has been issued in Pakistan as yet. The Selected Poems* therefore fills a crying gap. The fifty-three poems chosen by Ghose for this volume have been drawn from his three poetry collections and a previous and Selected published in United States. He has added substantially to number chosen for latter stateside volume, and not only with new, uncollected poems. Some items in earlier collections which he excluded from A Memory of Asia: New and Selected Poems (declaring that the ones not included in this volume do not now strike me