The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals ranges across time and place in visiting personal as well as historical and even imagined experience. As an abecedarian was once used to teach the basics of a thing—say, to recognize an alphabet—Gibson, who has labelled his collection a “scrambled abecedarian,” suggests that all meaning arises out of disorder. However, it is from this disorder that the varied subjects of the poems, controlled by a single form comprising the collection, are shaped into a significance, whether that significance is to record a life at its start, or at its conclusion. Degas In Degas’ The Absinthe Drinker, the woman in the bar looks so alone and depressed as she stares at her drink. Earlier, she was imagining she would meet someone as she was getting dressed; now, she stares at her drink. There are drunks all around. Everyone drinks absinthe. Lower-class women love it best. They stare at the drink (it’s a poison, literally; they could care less), as they pour it over sugar to cut its bitterness. They stare and drink. Degas said he viewed women as if through a bathroom keyhole: she gazes into her crystal ball’s green mist—stares, drinks.

In her highly ambitious second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg takes her inspiration from the alphabet. A meditation on the hump of a camel, and what it hides. A reminder that tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, and a vision of the plant as Adam’s downfall. The Book of Kells, gold-leafed and extravagantly decorated by monks. Titled for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, these poems are richly grounded in objects both humble and exotic. Vandenberg explores the intersection of power and forgiveness, and deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in emotionally poignant ways. “What will protect us?” one poem asks. “The words will be our weapons. In the end.” Moving between the physical and the abstract, the individual and the collective, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World unearths meaning—with astonishing beauty—from the pain of loss and separation.

The finest ghazals of Mir Taqi Mir, the most accomplished of Urdu poets. The prolific Mir Taqi Mir (1723–1810), widely regarded as the most accomplished poet in Urdu, composed his ghazals—a poetic form of rhyming couplets—in a distinctive Indian style arising from the Persian ghazal tradition. Here, the lover and beloved live in a world of extremes: the outsider is the hero, prosperity is poverty, and death would be preferable to the indifference of the beloved. Ghazals offers a comprehensive collection of Mir’s finest work, translated by a renowned expert on Urdu poetry.