Hasan's poetry is distinctive because he writes with a passion born out of a historical sense that sets him apart from most poets writing in English from our part of the world. No doubt inspired by W. B. Yeats, on whom he was to write his doctoral dissertation, in his first volume of verse, Between Barbed Wires (1977), Hassan meditates on things falling apart-- a world where mere anarchy is loosened upon the world. Or as he puts it in "Between Barbed Wires," the first poem of the Collected Poems, "The days are terrible and parlous/And the nights awful and fearful." In "Dhaka 1971", Hasan can barely contain his disgust at the scenes of horror he witnesses: "Filthy joints full of hogs,/ Khaki serpents, querulous apes,/ Crying vultures and barking dogs/ All in arson, loot and rape." Hassan's second volume, Inner Edge continues to record the nightmares of history in emotion-soaked verse. But more often than not these early poems are too scarred by the scenes of genocide, assassinations, arson, and state terrorism he has read about or witnessed to be first-rate political poetry.

The early poems, I am suggesting, are intemperate and at times too close to rant and too emotional to be good poetry. The hurt is very much there, as is the personal intensity, in Hassan's third volume of poems, Ashes and Sparks, but now we see him trying to temper his emotions somewhat. Which is to say, there is more art in these poems and less raw emotion to rankle poetry lovers.

However, though the title poem, "Ashes and Sparks", begins by suggesting that the poet is going to be "calm" and retreat into his own private universe of hurt inflicted by the "ashes and sparks, bombs and bullets/[of] this blood-soaked [twentieth] century of ours", Hassan's exasperation with America's first invasion of Iraq and the Bush Sr. government's manipulation of the United Nations, among other things, is obvious in lines such as: "I will give you hell in a flicker of fire" or "America your Armada is in the wrong Gulf/America come home your house is on fire/ There is a lot of smoke in the basement/Where your children spend the night opening coffins/like crates". The first of these two lines, of course, suggests Eliot ("I will give you fear in a handful of dust") but the second quote takes us to the anguished Ginsberg of the "Howl" poems.

On the whole, I find Hassan the poet more readable when he is a pensive mood and writing about themes other than history and politics. This is how he begins "Written in Winter", with his "hot breath cooling" on his beloved's "soft shoulder" and the "slow beat" of her "heart" cuddling him "like a koala." But here, unfortunately, his anger with the moral squalor of politics and the nightmares of history eventually takes the poem away from the serene mood of its opening lines. Indeed, the mood changes to the extent that soon we come across the following declaration: "I love winter for it keeps the monstrous crowd/out of sight, indoors, prevents military parades, air shows, political charades." The problem, as I see it, is that far too often Hassan's indignation takes him away from poetry, unlike, say, his favorite poet Yeats, who always manages to transform outrage or dismay into poetry with controlled metrics and profound mythmaking.

Timothy Brennan, a distinguished professor of English at Columbia, has found a unique way of praising Hassan's verse in the Introduction to Ashes and Sparks. He admires the poems because of their "intensity" and honest outrage. As I read the poems of the volume though, I keep thinking: when is Hassan going to learn to write a poem where from the beginning to the end he has managed to unite his thoughts and his feelings in the right proportions to create a truly effective poem about the nightmares of the history of one's nation?

Burning the Olive Branch, the last of his volumes of verse Hassan has reproduced in his Collected Poems is also full of bitter and/or defiant poems fighting back or crying out against political injustice, the plight of Palestine, and American aggression in Arab countries. It is in this volume that Hassan comes up with an observation that not only underscores his essential romantic affiliation but also explains his fits of exasperation: "Whoever is afraid of madness/is afraid of the truth,/for only in the frenzy of our mad moments/do we compel/our Creator/to stand face to face/and beg back our mortality." A wise poem and one that moves with a controlled gait and a poise that is profound, leaving one with the thought: why, alas, is Hassan so rarely in this mood and in such control of his emotions and his verse?

Fakrul Alam teaches English at Dhaka University.