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."

In recent years, the ghazal (pronounced "ghuzzle"), a traditional Arabic form of poetry, has become popular among contemporary English language poets. But like the haiku before it, the ghazal has been widely misunderstood and thus most English ghazals have been far from the mark in both letter and spirit. This anthology brings together ghazals by a rich gathering of 107 poets including Diane Ackerman, John Hollander, W. S. Merwin, William Matthews, Paul Muldoon, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and many others. As this dazzling collection shows, the intricate and self-reflexive ghazal brings the writer a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Agha Shahid Ali's lively introduction gives a brief history of the ghazal and instructions on how to compose one in English. An elegant afterword by Sarah Suleri Goodyear elucidates the larger issues of cultural translation and authenticity inherent in writing in a "borrowed" form.

Born in India and considered the leading poet on the South Asian subcontinent, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) was a two-time Nobel nominee and winner of the 1962 Lenin Peace Prize. His evening readings in Hindi/Urdu-speaking regions drew thousands of listeners. Associated with the Communist party in his youth, Faiz became an outspoken poet in opposition to the Pakistani government. He was also a professor of English literature, a distinguished editor and a major figure in the Afro-Asian writer's movement. This volume offers a selection of Faiz's poetry in a bilingual Urdu/English edition with a new introduction by poet and translator Agha Shahid Ali.

"Combining humane elegance and moral passion, (Agha Shahid) 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.

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.

With his prologue poem "Eurydice," Agha Shahid Ali's Nostalgist introduces the motifs of journey and exile, myth and politics, history and loss, that animate this collection. Mapping America as he travels west-ward, the Nostalgist is an exile from his native Kashmir, and even from his first American home; his is the unique perspective of the outsider. These jeweled, intricate poems, like th emultilayered "In Search of Evanescence," locate and reflect the America that must be "unseen to be believed."

Somewhere between cartographer and stargazer, the Nostalgist links images of water, desert, and myth, returning to Tucson in the monsoons, or seeing Chile in his rearview mirror, all the while creating an intense and vital vision.

"There are Mogul palace ceilings whose countless mirrored convexities at once reduce, multiply, scatter and enchant the figures under their spell. If I may speak for 'America,' it is a privilege to be held in so mercurial, many-faceted a gaze as this poet's, who goes to the heart of my troubles and turns them into bitter honey."—James Merrill