Hopeful/y the Pomegranate contains a small selection of Syed Najmuddin Hashim’s poems, ranging over four decades. From the deeply felt emotion of personal poems to the controlled anger of “political” ones, the poems reveal a man who at all times thought and felt intensely. Written in English, the poems are nevertheless rooted in Bangladesh even as they suggest a man who believed that he shared a common heritage with the rest of the world. The poems move easily between two worlds: if there is the misery caused by the cyclone on Char Tazmuddin, there is also the man-made misery in other parts of the world, in the paddy fields of the napalm-baked Mekong and “the Palestinian camps cowering/Under the unmoved cedars of Lebanon.” The poet uses a lucid, rhythmic free verse, often loaded with associations suggesting his wide reading and his international experience. Hopefully, this collection, long overdue, will reveal to an English reading public the poetic sensibility of a man who, in his own words, through the ages staked his claim to things, ideas and people. Readers will find that, despite the poet’s disclaimer, his eager grasp did not claw emptiness.