The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind : Selected Poems

Born in Assam, Avinash Shrestha migrated permanently to Kathmandu in 1990. His first three collections, Parewa: Seto Kala (1977), Samvedna, O Samvedna! (1981) and, particularly, Anubhuti Yatrama (1990) forged a quintessentially modern Nepali diction and imagery and created a stir in the Nepali literary scene. His work brought in influences from the regional poetry movements in India -Assamese, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali - and world poetry, ranging from the French symbolists to the Spanish surrealist Federico García Lorca, into the idiom of Nepali poetry which had, until then, been mired in social critique. His fourth collection, Karodoun Suryaharuko Andhakar (2003), blends his distinct brand of surrealism with themes of climate justice, mourning the ecological degradation in the Eastern Himalayas.

The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind, translated brilliantly by the award-winning Rohan Chhetri, is the first selection of Nepali poetry to be widely available in English, and maps the oeuvre of one of the most significant contemporary poets writing in the language today.