Songs of Idleness: Collected Poems

If you are morally sensitive, aesthetically inclined, and look for poetry peppered with old metrical rhythm and an Edwardian air, then this edition might just be the ideal donum for you. It offers you the range of what B. J. Sadiq can do with a pen fidgeting in his fingers. The range is startling—containing a set of cricket poems, both masterful and delightfully eccentric, capable of stirring an audience wherever the sport is played and immortalized. And it’s not just cricket. There’s something for everyone: for the dendrophile, who lingers about thickly shaded jungles, mourning their depletion; for political dissenters, who live in the hope of a God punishing the hubris of the governments that guide their lives; for the virtues of an honest lover; for animal lovers too, particularly the ones who have a heart that beats for the mongrel, brutally oppressed and sidling about our streets, thirsting for human acceptance. This collection is a corpus of meaningful poems, mostly serious and briefly comical, certainly far from a labor in vain, and most certainly canonical—an ode to some of the great poets of yore.

B. J. Sadiq is a British Pakistani writer, a prolific journalist, and an English poet. He is the author of a bestselling biography of Pakistan's former prime minister, Imran Khan, titled Let There Be Justice: The Political Journey of Imran Khan and has also written an acclaimed novella in verse, a satire called Of Kings and Nobilities.