Call Me Ishmael Tonight Read online

  Rooms Are Never Finished

  The Country Without a Post Office

  The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems

  A Nostalgist’s Map of America

  A Walk Through the Yellow Pages

  The Half-Inch Himalayas

  In Memory of Begum Akhtar & Other Poems

  Bone-Sculpture

  TRANSLATION

  The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems

  (Faiz Ahmed Faiz)

  OTHER

  Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English

  (Editor)

  T. S. Eliot as Editor

  About the Author

  Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri-American, was born on February 4, 1949, in New Delhi and grew up in Kashmir. He was educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and the University of Delhi. Shahid came to America in his early twenties and earned his Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and his M.F.A in Poetry at the University of Arizona in 1985. He taught at Hamilton College in New York, then became director of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He also taught at the University of Utah and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. In the spring of 2000, Shahid was a visiting poet in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at N.Y.U. Agha Shahid Ali’s volumes of poetry include Bone-Sculpture (1972), In Memory of Begum Akhtar & Other Poems (1979), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), and Rooms Are Never Finished (2001). Shahid also translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s collection The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems and was the editor of Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. He was awarded Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill fellowships and a Pushcart Prize, and his collection Rooms Are Never Finished was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.

  Copyright © 2003 by Agha Shahid Ali Literary Trust

  All rights reserved.

  First Edition

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Book design by Chris Welch

  Production manager: Andrew Marasia

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Agha, Shahid Ali, date.

  Call me Ishmael tonight: a book of ghazals / Agha Shahid Ali. — 1 st ed.

  p. c m.

  ISBN 0-393-05195-1

  1 Ghazals, American. I. Title.

  PR9499.3.A39 C35 2003

  821’.914 — dc21

  2002015950

  ISBN 978-0-393-32612-3

  ISBN 978-0-393-35204-7 (e-book)

  W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT