Sari Reams

This collection presents a fresh voice of a talented poet, Sadaf Saaz to win you over with her delicate word play crafted over three decades. Flow along the meandering verses to explore the ethnic delights of the mango, glass bangles and colourful edges of sari adorning the riches of this land. Immerse in the passionate voice that speaks of love and yearnings and at the same time campaigns for freedom, rights and social causes. Having grown up abroad, Sadaf is a true Bangladeshi at heart, and the rich verses aptly show her love and vision for the country…a place that is her destiny.

Reviews

The opposing powers of our presence, of our being in this mysterious world—the individual and society; nature and the self; the past and the present; thought and feeling; immanence and transcendence-are stunningly reconciled in Sadaf Saaz’s beautiful poems. Disciplined in their forms, flexible, airy, energetic, polyglot, and precise in their language, they are flawless lyrical models of our universe.
-Vijay Seshadri
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and literary critic

Sadaf has long been active as a writer and performer of poetry, and her many well-wishers will welcome this debut collection, which comes along with a CD of her readings of some of the poems. Her poetry responds passionately to current social and gender-related problems and ought to provoke serious critical lucubrations.
-Kaiser Haq
Poet, Essayist, Translator

Although she employs a range of techniques clearly drawn from historical examples, be they Tagore or Keats, Sadaf’s poems retain a certain mystery. She has assimilated a wealth of material and crafted her own new, unique voice.
-Wasifiri, review by Jocelyn Watson
December 2015

It is not everyday that one comes across a new voice in poetry. I am happy to hear Sadaf and her bunch of poems in the language of her upbringing with the excitement of a discovery. She has a cool and easy hand with words and images. She is deceptively simple yet her voice is that of anguish and pain of a woman.
-Syed Shamsul Hag
Poet, Playwright, Novelist

In this lively collection of poems, Sadaf Saaz mixes abstract ideas with mango and monsoon, mediations on the brevity of life, love, and sex, tension between two people at a cafe table with drum-beats of thunder and car-horns in Dhaka, all in language spiced by the textures, tastes and vocabulary of Bangla.
-Gillian Clarke
National Poet of Wales

At her best, in poems like ‘Under the Jackfruit Tree’ and
‘The Addicts’, Sadaf Saaz handles subjects (sex, addiction) most poets shy away from. More importantly, as few poets can, she carries it off.
-Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Poet, Literary Critic, Translator