Country Without A Post Office Poems: Poems

by Agha Shahid Ali

Overview

"Translucent elegies 'for the city that is leaving forever' (Srinagar) from one of its sons, who also happens to be one of America's finest younger poets."—John Ashbery

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393317619
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/28/1998
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	254,921
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) taught at the University of Utah, at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Editorial Reviews

Agha Shahid Ali's Kashmir, in his poems, is our own lost but inalienable homeland. . . . But the grace and wit, the perceptions and illuminations they serve, their accent, are his own.

W. S. Merwin

Combining humane elegance and moral passion, Ali speaks for Kashmir in a large, generous, compassionate, powerful and urgent voice. . . . Few poets in this country have such a voice or such a topic.

Hayden Carruth

Extraordinary formal precision and virtuosity. . . . This is poetry whose appeal is universal, its voice unerringly eloquent. A marvelous achievement.

Edward Said

This is the seventh book of poetry by Ali (A Nostalgist's Map of America, Norton, 1992), director of the writing program at the University of Massachusetts. The book is a poignant, nostalgic evocation of Kashmir, Ali's homeland, with a special emphasis on the events since 1990 when Kashmir rebelled against Indian rule. At the center of this devastation, with "mass rapes in the villages/ towns left in cinders," is the desecration in 1995 of the shrine of Sheikh Noor-ud-Din, the patron saint of Kashmir. This Hindu-Moslem conflict reminds Ali of similar genocidal wars in Bosnia and Armenia. But in Kashmir the blood of victims falls like "rubies/ on Himalayan snow" while "guns shoot stars into the sky." Kashmiri myth and culture hang like a tapestry around the poems, dramatizing the importance of saffron, paisley, the Shalimar Gardens and the ghazal (folk songs). Ali also alludes to Tacitus, Yeats, Dickinson, Shakespeare, and Eliot. With the population decimated and the post office destroyed, Ali's poems become "cries like dead letters," and the poet becomes "keeper of the minaret." Essential for all large collections.Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.

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