Existential Imagery, Cosmic Consciousness, and the Poetic Geography of Universal Humanity A Critical Evaluation of Mostofa Sarwar’s Three Poetry Collections to be published during Ekushey Bookfair
— Dr. Munir Mujtaba Ali, Former Professor of English and Chair, Department of Language and Literature Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. Founding Editor, Songam: Literary Journal of Southern University
Introduction: Three Books, One Expanding Poetic Universe
The three poetry collections—অবিকল নারী ও অন্যান্য কবিতা (The Exact Woman and Other Poems), বিচূর্ণিত গোধূলির মানচিত্র (The Map of a Fragmented Twilight), and অদৃশ্য পাখির নীল ছাই (The Blue Ashes of an Invisible Bird)—may be read as three interconnected territories within a single, evolving poetic universe. Although each collection possesses its own thematic emphasis and imaginative landscape, together they reveal a sustained engagement with the fundamental questions of human existence: love and loss, the body and desire, memory and history, knowledge and uncertainty, violence and compassion, and humanity’s place in an immense and often indifferent cosmos.
These books do not confine themselves to conventional lyrical expression. Their imaginative vocabulary moves freely among mythology, philosophy, science, history, politics, technology, and the natural world. The intimate experience of a lover may lead to a meditation on the structure of the universe; a mythological figure may become a vehicle for questioning the nature of consciousness; and a contemporary political catastrophe may open into a universal reflection on human suffering.
The three collections therefore invite a reading that goes beyond the classification of individual poems by subject or genre. They suggest a broader poetic project: the exploration of human existence through a combination of existential questioning, imaginative experimentation, and a deeply felt concern for universal humanity.
1. A Long Journey Through Time: Memory, Experience, and Existential Consciousness
The three collections also suggest an extended journey through different stages of poetic experience. The movement from personal memory and intimate relationships toward philosophical inquiry and global human concerns gives the work a distinctive historical and existential dimension.
In these poems, time is rarely a neutral background. It is experienced as loss, recollection, erosion, transformation, and the persistence of desire. The past remains active within the present, while the future appears uncertain and frequently threatened.
In the poem “অবিকল নারী” (“The Exact Woman”), the speaker recalls a relationship in which time itself seems to have been transformed by intimacy:
Much time has passed,
Yet there was never any weariness in the play of affection.
Not in dreams, but upon this very bed,
Upon this worn-out bed,
Our swiftly passing, enchanted time unfolded.
Now you are no longer here.
The worn bed becomes more than a physical object. It is a repository of intimacy, memory, and absence. The beloved’s disappearance does not erase the past; rather, it makes the past more tangible. The poem’s emotional force emerges from the tension between the permanence of remembered experience and the irreversibility of time.
This tension recurs throughout the three collections. Human beings inhabit the present, but their consciousness is continually shaped by what has disappeared. Memory becomes both a shelter and a wound.
2. The Body, Desire, and the Image of Woman in The Exact Woman and Other Poems
In অবিকল নারী ও অন্যান্য কবিতা, the human body and the experience of desire occupy an important place. Love is not presented exclusively as an abstract spiritual ideal. It is embodied, sensuous, vulnerable, and inseparable from the passage of time.
The title poem, “অবিকল নারী,” concludes with a striking image:
If someone were to gather together
all the art of the world,
what would emerge
would be only the exact woman.
The woman becomes an artistic and imaginative presence through whom the poet contemplates beauty, desire, and the limits of representation. The image is expansive: the accumulated achievements of human art are brought together, yet the woman remains irreducible to any single artistic representation.
The poem “নারীদের স্বাদ” (“The Taste of Women”) approaches desire from another direction:
I have tasted the women,
yet the entire thirst of the universe
remains inexhaustibly accumulated in my heart.
Here, desire is not simply a matter of physical gratification. It becomes an existential condition—a thirst that cannot be satisfied by possession or experience. The body opens onto an awareness of incompleteness.
This is an important aspect of the poet’s treatment of erotic experience. Sensuality and philosophical reflection are not mutually exclusive. Physical intimacy can become a means of confronting the mystery of existence, while desire itself reveals the limits of fulfilment.
The poem “প্রবালের গভীরে, তুমি ও রংধনু” (“Deep Within the Coral, You and the Rainbow”) offers another formulation of love:
The love floating within this rainbow
is never entirely light,
nor is it wholly darkness—
it is the broken, joined colors of two hearts,
a twilight illusion born
in the depths of water.
The image of the rainbow suggests that love is neither a perfectly harmonious union nor a complete dissolution of individual identity. It is a meeting of differences, a fragile coexistence of light and darkness. The poem thus moves beyond a conventional romantic ideal toward a more complex understanding of intimacy.
3. Existential Imagism: The Transformation of Ordinary Images
One of the most productive ways to approach these poems is through the idea of Existential Imagism. This is not a claim that the poet belongs to an established literary movement. Rather, it describes a recurring method in which concrete images become instruments for investigating the conditions of human existence.
The poems frequently begin with recognizable objects or scenes: a bed, a bird, a river, a shell, a tree, a city, or a landscape. Yet these images rarely remain confined to their immediate physical identity. They acquire psychological, philosophical, and sometimes cosmic dimensions.
In “স্বপ্নের বালিহাঁস” (“The Sand Geese of Dreams”), for example, the poet writes:
The sand geese of our dreams
swim only
in the deep darkness of our hearts,
swim and swim;
while helmeted criminals
pursue them relentlessly
like shadows.
The dream-birds suggest the vulnerability of imagination and hope. Their movement through the darkness of the heart is threatened by organized violence. The poem creates a disturbing contrast between the freedom of the inner world and the coercive forces of the external world.
In “মিথেনের একরাশ বিষে” (“Amid a Mass of Methane Poison”), the poet writes:
My blue-throated one, rendered unconscious
by the poison of methane—
my heart.
The mythological allusion to the blue-throated Shiva is transformed through the language of environmental catastrophe. The heart becomes a body exposed to toxic modernity. Myth, ecology, and personal anguish converge in a single image.
The poem continues:
When these waters are disturbed,
countless corpses rise to the surface.
The image suggests that beneath apparently calm waters lie the accumulated consequences of violence and destruction. Nature becomes an archive of human wrongdoing.
4. Love, Knowledge, and the Cosmic Imagination in The Map of a Fragmented Twilight
In বিচূর্ণিত গোধূলির মানচিত্র, the poetic imagination moves more explicitly toward philosophical and metaphysical questions. Love, myth, physics, and epistemology frequently enter into dialogue.
The poem “রাধার চোখে যমুনা, কৃষ্ণের বাঁশিতে অনন্ত” (“The Yamuna in Radha’s Eyes, Infinity in Krishna’s Flute”) reinterprets the Radha-Krishna relationship through the language of modern philosophical and scientific inquiry.
The poem begins:
This evening in Vrindavan
is uncertain of its own existence—
Is that melody a vibration of sound,
or the first desire
awakened in the emptiness
at the moment the universe was born?
The question is not merely whether Krishna’s flute produces a sound. The poem asks whether music itself may be understood as an expression of the universe’s primordial desire. Myth becomes a framework for contemplating the origin of existence.
The poem then brings physics into conversation with erotic experience:
Touch—
in the language of physics,
an exchange of forces between two bodies;
yet in the language of love,
the opening
of the gates of an infinite universe.
This juxtaposition is central to the poet’s method. Scientific language does not diminish the mystery of love; rather, it provides another vocabulary through which that mystery may be approached.
The poem concludes with an existential question addressed to Krishna:
Nandalal,
do you truly exist,
or has my desire
fashioned your body
in its own image?
Here, the familiar mythological figure becomes the subject of an epistemological inquiry. Is the beloved an independent reality, or is the beloved partly a creation of the desiring consciousness? The poem refuses to settle the question. Its power lies in preserving the ambiguity.
“জ্ঞানতত্ত্বের চুম্বন” (“The Kiss of Epistemology”) offers a related insight:
No further proof is necessary—
certain truths
leave their signatures
only upon the skin of feeling.
The poem questions the assumption that all knowledge must be established through rational demonstration. Some forms of human understanding emerge through experience, emotion, and embodied perception.
This is not necessarily a rejection of reason. It is an argument for the plurality of human ways of knowing.
5. The Metaphysics of Touch: Love Without the Erasure of Difference
The philosophical treatment of intimacy becomes particularly clear in “অস্তিত্বের নীল রহস্য” (“The Blue Mystery of Existence”):
Union does not mean dissolution;
it means becoming infinite
while remaining beside one another.
This is a significant formulation. Love does not require the disappearance of the individual self. Instead, two distinct beings may experience an enlarged sense of existence through their relationship.
Similarly, “স্পর্শের মহাকর্ষ” (“The Gravity of Touch”) asks:
Is gravity something like this,
where falling means
finding refuge
in someone's embrace?
The scientific concept of gravity is transformed into an emotional metaphor. Falling, ordinarily associated with loss of control, becomes a movement toward shelter. The image unites physical force and emotional vulnerability.
Across these poems, the body is neither a prison from which the soul must escape nor a merely biological object. It is a site where consciousness, desire, knowledge, and the mystery of existence meet.
6. Myth, Religion, and the Dialogue Between Cultures
The three collections draw upon a wide range of cultural and literary traditions. Radha and Krishna, Prometheus, Gilgamesh, and other mythological figures are not simply decorative references. They become imaginative resources through which contemporary experience can be reconsidered.
The use of myth is especially effective when the poet allows an ancient figure to enter into dialogue with a modern crisis. Myth then ceases to be a closed inheritance and becomes a living language.
This method also creates opportunities for dialogue between different intellectual and spiritual traditions. The poems do not need to resolve the differences between them. Their imaginative strength often lies in allowing different traditions to illuminate one another.
The result is a poetic world in which South Asian mythology, classical antiquity, modern science, and contemporary political realities coexist without being reduced to a single explanatory system.
7. Memory, Education, and the Intellectual Heritage of Humanity
The poem “প্রমিথিউস শুয়ে আছে কাফনের শ্বেতাম্বরে” (“Prometheus Lies in His White Shroud”) is dedicated to Dr. Harun-or-Rashid. It combines personal remembrance with a larger meditation on intellectual inheritance.
The poem recalls a moment of loss:
A star fell at Curzon Hall.
It became a headline on bdnews24.
My heart was torn; my eyes clouded.
From eight thousand miles away,
I saw
Prometheus lying
in his white shroud.
The distance of eight thousand miles intensifies the emotional effect. The speaker is physically remote, yet memory and intellectual attachment make the loss immediate.
The reference to Prometheus is especially meaningful. In Greek mythology, Prometheus represents the gift of fire, knowledge, and resistance to divine authority. The image therefore allows the death of an individual teacher to acquire a wider symbolic significance.
The poem also recalls the teacher playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” This memory links education with the humanistic ideals of art, intellectual freedom, and shared human experience.
The teacher becomes more than a figure from the past. He represents the transmission of knowledge and the possibility of a humane intellectual culture.
8. History, War, and the Geography of Human Suffering in The Blue Ashes of an Invisible Bird
In অদৃশ্য পাখির নীল ছাই, the poetic landscape expands toward international history, political violence, ecological destruction, and the suffering of displaced people.
The collection repeatedly reminds the reader that the individual human body exists within larger systems of power and historical conflict. War is not merely an event reported in the news; it is an experience that destroys homes, memories, relationships, and the ordinary conditions of life.
The poem “খার্গের তটে” (“On the Shores of Kharg”) presents a landscape marked by historical and cultural disappearance:
Broken shells
in the moonlight
resemble the bones
of a dead city.
The smoke of a fire temple
slowly disappears
into the sea mist.
The image of the fire temple suggests the fragility of cultural memory. The sea becomes a space in which the traces of a civilization slowly dissolve.
The poem does not need to describe destruction directly. Its quiet images of shells, bones, smoke, and mist evoke the remains of a world that may no longer exist in its former shape.
9. Gilgamesh, Mortality, and the Unattainable Dream of Immortality
The poem “গিলগামেশের স্বপ্নে ঘুমিয়ে থাকা মুক্তো” (“The Pearl Sleeping in Gilgamesh’s Dream”) invokes the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, one of humanity’s earliest literary explorations of mortality and the search for immortality.
The poem imagines:
Gilgamesh's sailors,
unable to find the grass of immortality,
would gather shells
from the sand of the shore;
inside those shells
even today
sleeps an invisible pearl—
whose light
no one has ever seen.
The invisible pearl becomes a powerful symbol of the unattainable. The search for immortality may fail, but the human imagination continues to preserve the possibility of something beyond ordinary perception.
The poem therefore transforms an ancient quest into a contemporary meditation on the limits of knowledge, the persistence of hope, and the mystery of human existence.
10. Technology, Capitalism, and the New Proletariat
One of the most distinctive features of The Blue Ashes of an Invisible Bird is its engagement with the language and realities of digital technology, automation, algorithms, and contemporary economic structures.
The poem “অ্যালগরিদম একটি সোনালি কাস্তে” (“An Algorithm Is a Golden Sickle”) begins with a striking metaphor:
An algorithm
is a golden sickle,
cutting through the misty veil
of the Arkabati River,
extracting the zeros
from inside the bones.
The algorithm is presented as an instrument of extraction. It does not simply process information; it cuts into the material and human realities hidden beneath digital systems.
The poem then turns toward those erased by technological and economic transformation:
In the terrible flood of being offline,
thousands of people
disappear from the map.
Their names
are automatically erased.
The language of digital disappearance becomes a metaphor for social invisibility. People who lose their economic or technological relevance risk disappearing from the systems through which contemporary society recognizes and records human existence.
The poem continues:
At the edge of the server farm,
in the dissecting room,
lie the thousand dead bodies
of jobs.
The image of the server farm as a dissecting room is particularly disturbing. Technological progress is associated not only with efficiency and innovation but also with the destruction of livelihoods.
The speaker then identifies a new social condition:
And we are the disconnected,
Marx's new proletariat,
obsolete hardware of an old inheritance,
falling silently
like magnolia flowers.
The reference to Marx brings the poem into dialogue with political economy. The “new proletariat” is not necessarily confined to the traditional industrial working class. It includes those rendered vulnerable or redundant by technological and economic restructuring.
The poem’s achievement lies in its effort to translate contemporary technological realities into a language of social and existential critique.
11. The Politics of Hunger: Bread, Power, and Human Dignity
The poem “ক্ষুধার রাজনীতি: রুটির ক্রেটগুলো কি হাতকড়া আর বেড়ি পরা ছিল?” (“The Politics of Hunger: Were the Crates of Bread Handcuffed and Shackled?”) turns its attention to hunger and the political control of humanitarian necessities.
It presents a devastating image:
In the archives of death and destruction,
the children of an abandoned desert
searched
through empty shelves.
The crates of bread were handcuffed and shackled,
imprisoned upon the sea.
“We had only asked
for a little bread...”
The question in the title is both ironic and accusatory. Bread, the most basic symbol of nourishment and survival, becomes a prisoner of political power.
The poem exposes the moral obscenity of a world in which food can be withheld while children starve. Its language is direct, but its central image is metaphorically charged: the crates themselves appear to be imprisoned.
The poem thus extends the collection’s concern with human dignity into the domain of political responsibility. Hunger is not merely a natural condition; it can also be produced and maintained by systems of power.
12. Gaza: War, Memory, and the Mirage of Hope
The poem “মরীচিকার দিকে যে মানুষটি হাঁটে” (“The Man Who Walks Toward the Mirage”) offers one of the collection’s most haunting engagements with contemporary human suffering.
The poem begins:
When night descends upon Gaza,
the sky no longer seems to be the sky—
it resembles
the torn lungs
of a dead god.
The image transforms the sky into a wounded body. The destruction of the city appears to have infected the heavens themselves.
The poem then introduces a shadow-like figure:
Beside him walks his soul—
a thin, shivering shadow,
within whose chest a bird
beats its wings every day,
only to be buried every day
beneath bricks, concrete, and oblivion.
The bird becomes a fragile emblem of hope, memory, and the human spirit. Its repeated suppression suggests the relentless violence through which ordinary lives are crushed.
The mirage is especially important to the poem’s symbolic structure:
The light is a mirage,
yet it seems to him
like the window of a lost home,
like the water of an oasis.
The oasis is both an image of survival and an illusion. It represents the possibility of refuge, but also the distance between hope and reality.
The shifting sands, date-plum trees, and acacias evoke a landscape in which memory and geography are continually transformed. The desert becomes a metaphor for displacement: what once seemed permanent may disappear, while what has been lost remains alive in the imagination.
Yet the poem does not allow its symbolic landscape to obscure the human reality of Gaza. It returns to the ordinary suffering of families:
But in the real Gaza,
a mother is still waiting,
a father is still digging through the earth,
a child, even in sleep,
is still searching
for the door of a lost home.
These lines are essential to the poem’s moral perspective. The symbolic and metaphysical dimensions of war must ultimately answer to the actual human beings who suffer its consequences.
The poem’s invocation of “Ulalume,” associated with Edgar Allan Poe’s exploration of loss, memory, and the unconscious, adds another layer to its treatment of grief. The name becomes a possible symbol of a lost beloved, an orphaned dream, or a vanished world:
Ulalume—
the name of a lost beloved,
the name of an orphaned dream,
or the name of that world
where children, before the war,
had learned
to recognize the human face.
The final image is especially moving. War has destroyed more than buildings and lives; it has damaged the elementary human capacity to encounter another person without fear.
13. Nature, Ecological Crisis, and the Unstable Cosmos
Nature in these collections is rarely a passive background. Rivers, oceans, deserts, glaciers, forests, and atmospheric phenomena participate in the emotional and philosophical structure of the poems.
Natural imagery frequently carries the weight of historical and ecological crisis. Water may conceal corpses; methane may poison the heart; the desert may embody displacement; and the sea may preserve the remains of vanished civilizations.
This approach challenges the conventional separation between human history and the natural world. Human violence does not remain confined to political institutions or battlefields. It enters rivers, air, soil, and the wider ecological system.
The poems also draw upon scientific language and cosmological imagery to suggest that human existence is embedded in a much larger universe. Yet this cosmic scale does not make individual suffering insignificant. On the contrary, it intensifies the question of how fragile human life is—and how urgently it deserves protection.
14. The Unity of the Three Collections
Although the three books differ in emphasis, their underlying concerns form a coherent imaginative structure.
The Exact Woman and Other Poems explores the intimate dimensions of existence: love, the body, desire, memory, and absence.
The Map of a Fragmented Twilight moves from intimacy toward philosophical and metaphysical inquiry. It examines the relationship between love and knowledge, myth and reality, the body and the cosmos.
The Blue Ashes of an Invisible Bird expands the poetic horizon toward historical memory, war, political injustice, technological transformation, ecological destruction, and universal human suffering.
The movement may therefore be understood as an expanding circle:
From the individual body to the intimate relationship;
From intimacy to the questions of knowledge and existence;
From individual existence to history and civilization;
From local and national experience to a global consciousness of human suffering.
This progression does not imply that the later collections abandon the concerns of the earlier ones. Rather, the intimate and the universal continue to illuminate one another.
The lost beloved, the endangered dream-bird, the mythological lover, the displaced child, and the technologically marginalized worker belong to the same broad imaginative universe. Each represents a different manifestation of human vulnerability.
15. Conclusion: Toward a Poetic Geography of Universal Humanity
The three collections of Mostofa Sarwar may ultimately be understood as an attempt to construct a poetic geography in which the intimate and the cosmic, the personal and the political, the ancient and the contemporary, and the local and the universal remain in continuous conversation.
Their central preoccupation is the human condition: the desire to love, the need to remember, the search for knowledge, the fear of disappearance, and the struggle to preserve dignity in a world marked by violence and uncertainty.
The poems do not offer simple answers to the questions they raise. They are more interested in sustaining the questions themselves. Does love reveal a truth that reason cannot fully grasp? Is the beloved an independent presence or a creation of desire? Can myth illuminate modern existence? What happens to human identity when technology renders people invisible? How can poetry bear witness to suffering without reducing it to rhetoric?
These questions give the three collections their philosophical coherence.
The poet’s imaginative world is populated by lovers, dream-birds, mythological figures, teachers, displaced children, workers, and the victims of war. They inhabit different historical and geographical spaces, yet their experiences are connected by a shared vulnerability.
In this sense, the movement from the intimate landscape of The Exact Woman and Other Poems, through the metaphysical inquiries of The Map of a Fragmented Twilight, to the historical and humanitarian concerns of The Blue Ashes of an Invisible Bird represents more than a change of subject. It is an expansion of poetic consciousness.
The ultimate achievement of these books lies in their effort to bring the mysteries of existence into contact with the urgent realities of human life. Their vision suggests that poetry can move between the bedroom and the battlefield, the river and the cosmos, the ancient myth and the digital server, without losing sight of the human being.
That is the larger promise of this poetic project: a poetry that seeks not merely to describe the world, but to question it, remember it, and defend the fragile dignity of those who inhabit it.