Beginning with the impassioned, never-before-published title poem, here is the life's work of a beloved Kashmiri-American 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 eyes This 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.

A meditation on love and loss, The Veil Suite is a collaboration between Israeli-born painter, Izhar Patkin, and Kashmir's most revered poet, the late Agha Shahid Ali. Shahid's poem, which uses Dante's form of the canzone, was written specifically for this collaboration, and is his last work.

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.

New essays, both personal and critical, on the work of beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali

"Ali's ghazals are contemporary and colloquial, deceptively simple, yet still grounded in tradition....Highly recommended."—Library Journal The beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali presents his own American ghazals. Calling on a line or phrase from fellow poets, Ali salutes those known and loved—W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, James Tate, and more—while in other searingly honest verse he courageously faces his own mortality.

Concerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, Veil and Burn illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, become it, and in the transformation, to understand the suffering body. In poems about animals, artifacts, and monsters, Lambeth displays a fascination for all bodies while exploring their pain, common fate, alienation, and abilities. Hovering between poem and prose fragment, between the self and fellow creatures, Laurie Clements Lambeth celebrates physical sensation, imbuing it with lyric shape, however broken, however imprisoned the shape may be.

Here Is A Haunted And Haunting Volume That Establishes Agha Shahid Ali As A Seminal Voice Writing In English. Amidst Rain And Fire And Ruin, In A Land Of `Doomed Addresses`, The Poet Evokes The Tragedy Of His Birth Place, Kashmir.

"An incomparable work, an unmatched achievement."—Anthony Hecht In this stunningly inventive collection—a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in poetry—Ali excavates the devastation wrought upon his childhood home, Kashmir, and reveals a more personal devastation: his mother's death and the journey with her body back to Kashmir.

The beautifully written first biography of one of the world’s finest twentieth-century poets Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) was one of the most celebrated American poets of the latter twentieth century, and his works have touched millions of lives around the world. Traversing multiple geographies, cultures, religions, and traditions, he mapped the varied landscapes of the Indian subcontinent and the United States. In this biography, Manan Kapoor narrates Shahid’s evolution, following in the footsteps of the “Beloved Witness” from Kashmir and New Delhi to the American Southwest and Massachusetts. He charts Shahid’s friendships with literary figures such as James Merrill, Salman Rushdie, and Edward Said; explores how Shahid responded to events around the world, including the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the AIDS epidemic in America; and draws on unpublished materials and in-depth interviews to reveal the experiences and relationships that informed his poetry. Hailed upon its release in India as “lush” and “poetic,” A Map of Longings is the story of an extraordinary poet, the works he left behind, and the legacy of his singular poetic vision.

I At the end of the ’eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets with great trees casting great shadows had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were said to leak, which they did not, and the drains to be bad, though that was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little seventeenth century panes, had lost the romance they had when I had passed them still unfinished on my way to school; and because the public house, called The Tabard after Chaucer’s Inn, was so plainly a common public house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof where nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some architect friend of my father’s, that it had been put there to keep the birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and helped us to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: “The congregation are requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung upon pegs provided for the purpose.” In front of every seat hung a little cushion and these cushions were called “kneelers.” Presently the joke ran through the community, where there were many artists who considered religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who disliked that particular church.