Poet Joy Goswami recites his own works at Book Fair 2006. A Telegraph picture

After a longish drought, “the rock moved out of the way and poems just flowed”. That’s how Joy Goswami describes the origin of his latest book — a collection of 70 poems.

Some of the poems in Prem O Mrityur Kobita (Poems on Love and Death), to be released by Ananda Publishers early next year, have appeared in Desh.

“It happened during the rains,” the poet tells Metro. “I was part of Triveni, featuring vocalist Pandit Ulhas Kashalkar and dramatist Bratya Basu, and Nijer Rabindranath, a programme with singer Rahul Mitra where Tagore’s poems and music were used to portray my personal relationship with the bard. I think that was what did it — listening to music thinking of love and death.” He adds: “People fill their rooms with incense; I with music. It is my most powerful source of inspiration.”

But it is not just music. Everyday reality, insights, emotions and newspaper headlines make their way into the verses.

“Reports of suicides, my thoughts on death, glimpses of a girl crossing a road in the rain, experiences of love that are not always easy to bring into the open, my parents… are behind the poems. There are tributes to Shakti Chattopadhyay and a poem on a girl who died within a year of her marriage, which I had attended,” says the poet.

The language of these poems, he feels, is new, “At least, I hope so, because that is what I am constantly trying to achieve. I change every day. Experiences make me a different person from what I was even a minute ago. My poems are not true if they do not reflect that change,” states Goswami.

Unlike his previous collection, which contained long poems, there are tiny pieces, some of them barely two or three lines long, in the new book.