Commentary on author

What I like most about Raza Ali Hasan‚s poetry is his management of cadence. He loves English words, and he loves to juxtapose them with unfamiliar nouns like bulbuls and mynahs, „the proper ornithology for the symbols of woe.‰ His work is highly political and ironically formalist at the same time. There are not many people writing in his historical, post-colonial, disenchanted radical vein: he is an authentic original. He is a man with something important to say, not a navel gazer: he applies his poetic intelligence to the major injustices of our times. On the other hand he‚s not a polemicist in verse: his poems are too consciously artistic and too oblique to admit of propaganda. "Optics," for example, is an elegantly concise poem with a grave sureness of touch that makes its claim for the historical primacy of Islamic science in the most understated language.

–Professor Elizabeth Cullingford, University of Texas, Austin, TX.