| A Walk Through the Yellow Pages.
Agha Shahid Ali 1987 Sun Lizard Chapbook 4.50 The Half-Inch Himalayas
A Nostalgist's Map of America
|
Most of us have better
things to do than read poetry. I'm just as happy watching clouds billow
and spin over a mountain top. Yet here I am reading three books by Agha
Shahid Ali. He's good. Maybe even better than good. He has some news to
tell us Americans, especially in his latest book--A Nostalgist's Map
of
America. Shahib Ali is the poet as geographer and he's been many places, from his native Kashmir to Amherst, Massachusetts. Personally, I want to get lost in poetry, in the sense of leaving my world and entering another so absorbing I forget my responsibilities and my pleasures too--those clouds billowing and spinning. Then I want to find myself again. Lost and found. In a sense this is the paradox that informs Ali's poetry. Over and over again he dives deeply into his own sense of loss--his country, his parents, his identity as an Indian. |
| He does go home again in The Half-Inch
Himalayas and he sees that old world through new eyes. But he knows
he can never really go back and take up that old identity--Son of India--because
he's been in the West, been educated here, found friends here and sorrows
here.
Ali has found something we've lost in America, a sense of exotic, everyday beauty. But he gives it back to us in language as precise and delicate as a rapier: "You drive your car/ its wheels dying/ on the platinum tar of tides/ a highway on the sea/ paved by the rising moon/ Sirens whispering/ on their lips the sinking/ breaths of salt . . . ." Shahib Ali comes from a tradition and a people who know their poets. They have memorized them and dare to recite them, as in "A Butcher" in which the butcher and the speaker exchange lines of poetry: "I smile and quote/ a Ghalib line; he completes/ the couplet, smiles,/ quotes a Mir line. I complete/ the couplet." That's India. In America, Ali finds our Emily Dickinson. He takes her "Route of Evanescence" and builds a poetic sequence out of it as he mourns a friend who died too young. Looking for the route, he finds "But even/ when I pass--in Ohio--the one exit/ to Calcutta, I don't know I've begun/ mapping America, the city limits/ of Evanescence now everywhere. It/ was a year of brilliant water, Phil,/ such a cadence of dead seas at each turn." If Ali can be of use to us non-poetic Americans it is to bring us to a multi-layered awareness of our own country: Calcutta, Ohio or Tucson, Arizona. In a poem entitled "I Dream I Return to Tucson in the Monsoons" Ali describes the ancient seabed that once covered the bone-dry desert floor: "The moon turned the desert to water/ For a moment I saw islands/ as they began to sink. . . . " Agha Shahid Ali has a magic that better-than-good poets have: he entices us into thinking there is nothing more enlivening to do than read poems about islands sinking in lost seas. His poems give us back something we've lost--an America of infinite possibility and tragic beauty.
Claire Keyes is a Professor in the English department, currently teaching Modern American Poetry. She has published poems in numerous literary magazines and is preparing a book of poems for publications |
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