Midnight, Dhaka

Mir Mahfuz Ali is an exceptional new voice in British Poetry. A native of what is now Bangladesh, Mahfuz grew up during the difficult period of the early 1970's when the region was struck, first by a devastating cyclone, then by a particularly vicious civil war. As a boy, Mahfuz witnessed atrocities and writes about them with a searing directness in poems like 'My Salma' and the title poem. But much more than this, his trauma becomes transformative, and his poetry the key to unlocking memories o