Author: Agha Shahid Ali
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 106
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178240912
Description
Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) is among the handful of post-Independence Indian poets to have gained international recognition as a writer of great originality and technical accomplishment. This volume comprises his final two verse collections, Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A book of Ghazals and Rooms Are Never Finished : Poems.
In Call Me Ishmael Tonight the poet offers a new form-the American ghazal-written as salutation to his eminent poet contemporaries in the USA. In this he also courageously faces the fact of his own mortality.
In Rooms Are Never Finished the poet follows the trail of is previous collection titled The Country Without a Post Office in order to excavate the devastation wrought upon Kashmir, his childhood home-the place about which he felt most deeply. He links a more personal devastation to the destiny o his homeland: his mother’s death and the journey with he body back to Kashmir.
There are poems of amazing inventiveness, infused with passion and grief. This is a collection which reinforces the view that Agha Shahid Ali possessed a voice of the rarest distinction.
Contents
I Have Loved
Arabic
For You
By Exiles
Of It All
In Real Time
Of Fire
Things
Shines
My Word
From The Start
Angels
Of Water
As Ever
Land
Not All, Only A Few Return
Even The Rain
Water
Of Snow
Air
About Me
In Marble
Bones
In
Beyond English
Of Light
Stars
For Time
God
Forever
After You
In Arabic
Tonight
Existed
LENOX HILL
FROM AMHERST TO KASHMIR
Karbala: A History of the House of Sorrow
Zainab’s Lament in Damascus
Summers of Translation
Above the Cities
Memory
New Delhi Airport
Film Bhajan Found on a 78 RPM
Srinagar Airport
God
Ghalib’s Ghazal
The Fourth Day
By the Waters of the Sind
ROOMS ARE NEVER FINISHED
Ghazal
Barcelona Airport
A Secular Comedy
Heaven
Earth
Hell
The Nature of Temporal Order
Ghazal
On Hearing a Lover Not Seen for Twenty Years
Has Attempted Suicide
Suicide Note
Ghazal
The Purse-Seiner Atlantis
ELEVEN STRARS OVER ANDALUSIA
On our last evening on this land
How can write above the clouds?
There is a sky beyond the sky for me
I am one of the kings of the end
One day I will sit on the pavement
Truth has two faces and the snow is black
Who am I after the night of the estranged?
O water, be a string to my guitar
In the exodus I love you more
I want from love only the beginning
Violins
I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World
Notes