Poetry

Serendipity

Wake me up every morning as dawn becomes a new day.

WB Yeats’s ‘Easter, 1916’ and Bangladesh’s July 1-36, 2024

What motivated our youth to defy death in order to free Bangladesh from the yoke of a brutal regime?

POETRY / October: An unfinished poem

Glamorous lightweight raindrops  from the October sky keep 

POETRY / Silence

A star fell on the ground in the windy night

POETRY / Republic of the dead

As if playing a game of chess / Still the world waits for the next dawn

POETRY / Sinking in ink

Don’t you see— I can only write dark. 

POETRY / Devi

The first pulse, in the midst of a whipping maelstrom, 

POETRY / The wheel of change

Eternity collapses at the wheel of change. / Past is lost

POETRY / Fall

August, marked with dying things. Summer’s end, / My freedom spent

September 29, 2022
September 29, 2022

Still Green

A late summer in June,

September 17, 2022
September 17, 2022

Ritual

Morning sun, and its endearing ardor swathes my spent body, I awake a ghost.

September 15, 2022
September 15, 2022

SHOUTxDS Books presents ‘Slam Poetry Nights’ — Episode 1

The poems ranged from mental health issues to individual freedom of expression and every musing in between.

September 15, 2022
September 15, 2022

The possibilities of slam poetry

The evening of September 8 at The Daily Star Centre saw an outpouring of verses to a live and very interactive audience. Daily Star Books and SHOUT jointly launched our series of Slam Poetry Nights—an evening, every month, of verses recited in the spirit of creative freedom.

September 11, 2022
September 11, 2022

In ‘Nehai’, Yusuf Muhammad’s doha verses explore the ceaselessness of life

The aim of a dohakar has always been to open the eyes of the masses. Many of the dohas written by the two prominent dohakars, Soroho-Pa and Kabir Das, have modernist, anti-establishment themes, criticising the social, political and religious conventions of their times. 

September 8, 2022
September 8, 2022

A deep dive into a poet’s mind

He had lost touch almost completely with his craft, so much so that he wondered if he even had it in him. But even so, for the sake of writing, he wrote. When the pandemic hit, Helal batted off the dust of his desk and sat down to write. Sitting from a foreign land, the ink flowed again.

September 5, 2022
September 5, 2022

The Day I die

Poignant lines on wishful death

August 31, 2022
August 31, 2022
August 30, 2022
August 30, 2022

Writer becomes bestseller after his own employer buys copies worth 9 crore

Chulbul, who has written 29 books of poetry in his career spanning 9 months, characterises his style as introspective, post-modernist neo-absurdism.

August 13, 2022
August 13, 2022

How I feel about Virginia Woolf being part-Bengali

Maybe I loved her so because we were daughters of the same soil, to some extent, at least. It made me smile. But I also sneered at myself a little bit, because her soil had also ripped apart mine for over 200 years.