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.

"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.

"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.

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.

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.

The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid's Tale "brings a swift, powerful energy" to this "intimate and immediate" poetry collection (Publishers Weekly). These beautifully crafted poems -- by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate -- make up Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering to date, setting foot on the middle ground / between body and word. Some draw on history, some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death, especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent. But they also inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.

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