The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems - Hardcover

Ali, Agha Shahid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393068048 ISBN 13: 9780393068047

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

Beginning with the impassioned, never-before-published title poem, here is the poet.

Agha Shahid Ali died in 2001, mourned by myriad lovers of poetry and devoted students. This volume, his shining legacy, moves from playful early poems to themes of mourning and loss, culminating in the ghazals of Call Me Ishmael Tonight. The title poem appears in print for the first time.

from “The Veiled Suite”

I wait for him to look straight into my eyesThis is our only chance for magnificence.If he, carefully, upon this hour of ice,will let us almost completely crystallize,tell me, who but I could chill his dreaming night.Where he turns, what will not appear but my eyes?Wherever he looks, the sky is only eyes.Whatever news he has, it is of the sea.

About this title

About the Author

Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) taught at the University of Utah, at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Reviews

Starred Review. SignatureReviewed by Mark DotyAn archetypal vocabulary entered into the late Agha Shahid Ali's poems from the Arabic masters he loved, from the passionate popular songs of India and even from Bollywood movies: beloved, mirror, flame, rose. But the romance of these recurrent terms is always countered by the reality of political violence and the harsh and bloody erasure of the poet's homeland, Kashmir—both the Vale of legend and song and also a country without a post office, nearly unreachable, shattered in the late 20th century as territory claimed both by India and by Pakistan. Both forced into exile and drawn abroad by the wider landscape of poetry in English, Ali (1949–2001) was a lifelong traveler; he came of age in a time when Everyone carries his address in his pocket so at least his body will reach home. No wonder his poems fill with letters, addresses, envelopes, lost messages and maps, and with images of home recalled and revisited in dreams, themselves a mode of travel. The displaced wanderer carries the sorrows/ that haunt the survivors of Dispersal that country/ which has no map... Diaspora, he understood, is a category of being in our time.Ali's deep attraction to song, the formal properties that lend even the darkest lyric aspects of pleasure, is everywhere on display here. Ali became well-known for popularizing the ancient Persian poetic form the ghazal among American readers. Many of his own fine examples are collected here, but the poems also reveal the influence of Ali's friend James Merrill, not only in terms of their formal elegance but in the way that a resonant, emotional ambiguity allows the poet to simultaneously celebrate love and lament a landscape of personal and public losses. I have no house, he writes, only/ a shadow but whenever you are in need/ of a shadow my shadow is yours. That combination of rue and generosity feels exactly true to this poet's character, and that signature blend of warmth and regret shines powerfully throughout this entire collection. Perhaps it's best exemplified in this passage, which evokes a performance by the great singer of ghazals, Begum Akhtar: It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,/ perhaps there were sirens,// air-raid warnings./ ...but she went on/ singing, and her voice// was coming from far/ away, as if she had already died./ ...it was/ .../a moment when only a lost sea/ can be heard, a time// to recollect/ every shadow, everything the earth was losing.Ali so thoroughly inhabits his exile, in this haunting life's work, that he makes of it—both for his own spirit and for his readers—a dwelling place. (Feb.)Mark Doty is a memoirist and poet. His Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry.
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393068048
• ISBN 13: 9780393068047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 391