Agha Shahid Ali

Rooms Are Never Finished

"Ali commands a virtuosity of technique and a range of feelings available to very few poets now writing in English."—Anthony Hecht

As in his previous collection, Country Without a Post Office, Agha Shahid Ali excavates the devastation wrought upon Kashmir, his childhood home. But here he reveals a more personal devastation: his mother's death and the journey with her body back to Kashmir. Binding these poems is a virtuosic use of both given and open forms—canzones, sonnets, ghazals, terza rima, prose poems, and Sapphics. To these demanding forms, Ali brings a conversational ease that belies his virtuosity. The result is a poetry of stunning inventiveness, infused with passion and grief.

"What is timeless in these poems is the power of grief—sheer cliffs and drops of despair that Ali masters and spins into verse with astonishing technical virtuosity, employing his favorite form, the ancient ghazal. . . . Besides Buddha and the Koran, there are echoes here of Judaic scripture. Ali is the voice of the whirlwind, the form once taken by the deity of the Old Testament. As the ghazal form weaves itself into the echoing tapestry of grief-readers follow the patterns, rapt, discerning chanting beyond the words. It is as if the high keening cry of elephants driven to their death by invaders of Kashmir—the sound that his dying mother likened to the sirens outside her hospital room at Lenox Hill in New York—rises in unbearable importuning."—Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times

"Ali's poems speak to the enduring qualities of love and friendship. With elegance and wit,they also speak to the difficulty of maintaining such relationships. In 'Barcelona Airport,' Ali recounts an interrogation by an airport security officer who asks if he is carrying anything that could be dangerous. Ali replies, 'O just my heart.'"—Michael Collier, in Poet's Corner, The Baltimore Sun