Written at locations as widely disparate as eastern India, northern Canada, western Bolivia, southern Ireland, and even the taxiway at Boston's Logan airport, these poems explore the broad reach of the English erotic idiom. These are pomes about love - sometimes illicit though often not - lust, and the language of desire. Not primarily concerned with displacement or diasporic experience, they nevertheless reveal a deracinated and dark-limbed Krishna sort of fellow - reminiscent of classical Sanskrit erotic poetry - flitting in and out of these pages.

"Garbadine & Other Poems brims with love - the illicit, the lustful and the untroubled kind. These are the manifest gestures of Bagchee's longing or meaning, his recongition of the erotic and of life in general as always essentially unfinished business. Women are landscape here, and landscape is romance. These, and the littler things . . . are wrought splendid through his disarmingly quiet and profound mastery of the possibilities inherent only in poetry." - SHANI MOOTOO

"Bagchee's art lies precisely in his ability to write the spare, concealed line and still suceed in reverbrerating his erotic sensibilities throughout these poems. Garbadine & Other Poems is certainly a feast of the language of the erotic." - RIENZI CRUSZ

Shyamal Bagchee's profile page

Though balding rapidly, Shyamal Bagchee is an unrepentant romantic. This is his first book of poems; a second will appear shortly. His poetry has been published in literary journals internationally. He attended universities in Delhi, Santiniketan (Tagore's “poet's school?), Hamilton, Ontario, and Toronto. Shyamal Bagchee lives and writes in St Albert, Alberta. He loves driving very long distances on that province's uncrowned highways and byways. He is a keen and serious photographer.

"An unusual and sophisticated collection." — Dawn
"Gabardine & Other Poems brims with love - the illicit, the lustful and the untroubled kind. These are the manifest gestures of Bagchee's longing for meaning, his recognition of the erotic and of life in general as alwyas essentially unfinished business. Women are landscape here, and landscape is romance. These, and the littler things...are wrought splendid through his disarmingly quiet and profound mastery of the possibilities inherent only in poetry." - Shani Mootoo
"Bagchee's art lies precisely in his ability to write the spare, concealed line and still succeed un reverberating his erotic sensibilities throughout these poems Gabardine & Other Poems is certainly a feast of the language of the erotic." - Rienzi Crusz