With the coming of the month of February attention focuses on our Language Movement, on the fight to preserve our mother tongue and the role of poetry in that struggle. However, the reader searching for books on the subject in English will be quite at a loss to find them - that is, unless one goes to the Bangla Academy grounds on a quiet non-February day to browse through their publications. The layer of dust on these stacks of books in the academy bookshop is indicative, as pointed out by Rafi Hossain in his article on Ekushey Boi Mela, of that institution's lack of promotion and publicity about its works. This, one feels, is especially true of its English-language productions.

For the surprise of the volume under review is how informative it is on the subject of the role of poetry in the creation of Bangladesh, which is necessarily a fairly complicated narrative, interweaving the multiple strands of politics and creative literary fire. The author Mohammed N. Huda has attempted, in his words, "not an aesthetic evaluation of" Bangladesh poetry, but to delineate the "cultural base" of the movement which finally resulted in the emergence of Bangladesh. Within the stated framework, he has succeeded admirably.

The volume is divided into seven chapters, beginning with 'Poetic Activities in Bangladesh' where the author provides a competent overview of the state of poetry and poetic activities in the country, including an affectionate and amusing (no doubt unintended) account of the "nonstop poetry reading from sunrise to midday on February 21" on the Bangla Academy grounds. Chapters 2 to 6 is the heart of the book, where the author then goes on to explicate, in slow fascinating detail, how ancient Bengal's cultural nationalism and Hinduism mixed to give birth to the religious Mother image in its poetry (from the goddess Durga, from the construction of Mother India by Hindu anti-colonial nationalists) and which then was transformed into a secular Mother image in the hands of Bangladeshi Muslim poets, who both inherited the Bengali poetic tradition and extended it on their own terms. Historically, in Bengal Language came first, later defining the nation (the Land), followed by Literature, and finally, Liberation. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 respectively continues the examination of the Mother image, the eulogizing of the Bengali language, the Ekushey theme and the Shahid Minar image in our poetry, moving the analysis in a satisfying way from the general to the particular, from the historical to the current time. One fascinating fact that emerges from the book is that were it not for the encouragement given by the Turkish sultans of Bengal, Bengali language would not have been able to displace Brahmanic Sanskrit and grow in its stead. It makes one smile, hopefully not with the same arrogance, at the cultural pride exhibited by later Calcutta Hindu bhadraloks in their language while at the same time denouncing 'Muslim imperialism' in India.

The author's passion for the subject is palpable and communicates itself to the reader. He is also rather good on the topic of the Mother image in Shamsur Rahman's poems. Chapter 7, the final chapter, ends all too briefly on the topic of War poetry, on verses born out of the liberation war of 1971. The book concludes with a more than adequate bibliography and index.

The faults of the volume are the structural faults familiar to all English language books published in Dhaka: sub-standard English, typos, misspellings, a limited vocabulary and awkward sentence constructions. It could have been so much more well written, given its subject matter, that the reader is almost forced into emitting a disconsolate sigh. The Bangla Academy is an official institution, and it must take care to produce English language works of a better standard.

Farhad Ahmed is a free-lance contributor to The Daily Star literature page.