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.

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."

"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

"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