The Veiled Suite is the long overdue Collected Poems of Agha Shahid Ali. It is a great disappointment that Penguin India have merely republished the WW Norton version of it. This is because the Norton version does not have Ali’s first two collections Bone-Sculpture and In Memory of Begum Akhtar (both published by P Lal of Calcutta) and begins with his first US collection The Half-Inch Himalayas and because even with all subsequent collections, not every poem is included. This is what Penguin India did with Eunice de Souza’s Collected Poems and it is surprising Norton has this impoverished understanding of a Collected Poems.
A Collected Poems is a landmark publication in any poet’s life and must include every poem written. Often, it contains Juvenilia and unpublished poems as well. In Ali’s case special care should have been taken to produce this volume because he’s been dead eight years now and because the Collected Poems shows a wide-ranging and complex engagement with the subcontinent, especially Kashmir and Ali remains (though he died a US citizen) one of the subcontintent’s most serious practitioners of poetry in English.
For example, The Half-Inch Himalayas contain poems re-worked from the first two Indian collections and readers would show the graph of this constantly evolving poet. The Introduction by Daniel Hall, also reproduced in this edition, is a shame and a missed opportunity. A shame because it is a confidently shallow account and a shame because a more knowledgeable Indian, familiar with Ali’s work and with Indian English poetry would have been beneficial to readers (Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s remarkable Introduction to Arun Kolatkar’s posthumously published The Boat Ride and Other Poems comes to mind). But one cannot expect any level of care and attention from Penguin India as publishers and certainly not of poetry.
Nevertheless, it is a treat to have most of Ali’s work in one place and be able to delineate the expansion of his imagination, his craft (his encounter with US poet James Merrill was to convert him to a fastidious engagement with form in general and difficult forms in particular) and trace his journey to the last assured ghazals in English of his final collection, written with a lightness of touch that conceals the superior craft of them.
His books can be divided into two broad categories: the US ones and the Kashmir ones but it would be a schematic distinction and in the end untenable because both world spill into each other to create the particular cosmology of Ali’s poems and his psychic universe. His first collection published in the US Half-Inch Himalayas recreates familial and political history, mostly of Kashmir. All the ingredients which will mark Ali’s poetry for the rest of the collections — especially his finest later work — are here: his relationship and evocation of his mother, ghosts and memories that haunt places, the legendary thumri and ghazal singer Begum Akhtar, the relationship between politics and poetry.
A Walk Through the Pages, full of macabre re-writings of fairy tales and disturbing phone calls, is his most unusual collection but shows that a whacky imagination marks all his work, the unsettling quality of the poems mirroring his own unsettled perspective as a poet in all his work. The Nostalgist’s Map of America builds a panoramic history of the United States from Tucson and Native American myth through Emily Dickinson and Georgia O’Keefe to the eponymous poem about a lover dying of AIDS. In between, are poems about Laila and Majnoon, Ghalib, Medusa, the Graeae sisters. It is characteristic of Ali’s eclectic materials that a poem can move from Tucson to Begum Akhtar singing in Delhi!
The final three collections, his crowning achievements are thematically mainly about his mother’s death, Kashmir (The Country Without a Post Office, Rooms are Never Finished) and his experiments with the ghazal form in English (Call me Ishmael Tonight). But it is what Ali does with these themes formally — through a range of difficult forms like the canzone, the Sapphic stanza and the ghazal — that makes them magical.
The best of them are in the form of dreams, visions and imaginative evocations and their particular blend of what can be termed affective excess and strictly reined-in craft makes them almost painful to read. One has to put them down and breathe before one can resume reading.
Indeed, this sensibility, this temperament (Ali famously said ‘I don’t have a philosophy, I have a temperament’) is what marks Ali’s poetry apart from anything produced by subcontinental poets writing in English. This is not just because Urdu, Kashmiri, Persian and Arabic form part of his linguistic heritage but various literary traditions in these languages are employed by him but because he weaves all these strands into a cosmological world where each of these components are defamiliarised. For example, he can be seen as deeply religious — and as much Hindu as Muslim — but not so much in terms of belief as a structure of feeling, In immortal poems like ‘Lenox Hill,’ I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World’ and ‘Tonight’ from each of these three final collections, Ali is at the height of his powers and it does not seem incongruous that Emily Dickinson and Begum Akhtar share space, that Ali becomes his own mother’s mother, that Eqbal Ahmed and Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish all make appearances. For these poems alone this book is worth it. Go out and buy it and read these poems over and over for years to come.
— Ashley is an academic.
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