SOURCE: Kanaganayakam, Chelva. “Memory and Artifice in Poetry.” In Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose, pp. 10-32. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Kanaganayakam studies the changes in content, tone, style, and form in Ghose's poetry from his earlier poems to more recent endeavors. Kanaganayakam notes Ghose's growing sense of displacement and makes a distinction between changes in Ghose's poetry and changes in his fiction.

Zulfikar Ghose began his literary career as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems, The Loss of India, in 1964 (hereinafter cited as Loss); his fifth and most recent collection of poems, entitled Selected Poems, appeared in 1991 (hereinafter cited as SP).¹ The latter, like his previous collection, A Memory of Asia (1984), contains previously uncollected poems and a selection from his earlier writings. Granted the provisionality of neat classifications, one could still assert that, taken together...