Logo

Synopsis Agha Shahid Ali is among the handful of post-independence Indian poets to have gained international recognition as a writer of great originality and technical accomplishment. In this volume of new poems, the last to be published within his lifetime, Agha Shahid Ali follows the trail of his 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. In the present volume, the poet links a more personal devastation to the destiny of his homeland: his mother’s death and the journey with her body back to Kashmir. Binding these poems is a virtuoso use of traditional poetic forms: sonnets, canzones, ghazals, terza rima, Sapphics, and free verse. Into these moulds Agha Shahid Ali manages to pour a conversational ease, creating the wonderful mix of the formal and the colloquial which has been recognised as his distinctive contribution to English verse. These are poems of amazing inventiveness, infused with passion and grief. This collection conclusively reinforces the view that Agha Shahid Ali possesses a voice of the rarest distinction.