The Country without a Post Office: Poems (Agha Shahid Ali)
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.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.