God Sobs in His Arms

A collection of poems is the story of a journey and from the outset the ambition to incorporate East/West imagery is made clear. The first part,The Half-Inch Himalayas,gives us imagistic snapshots of his family in Kashmir. These recollections prepare us for the complex explorations that follow,and the frequent couplets and tercets of this section give way to ghazals and terza rimas of the subsequent collections. Flight from Houston in January describes the snow as being dervishes/ whirling and whirling/ till they become the trance/ of everwhite trees/ found on Christmas trees…. At this stage in Alis writing,the East/West imagery serves as adornment,with the snow image in this poem dismissed as so much white dust.

The challenge then is to find a language equal to the demands of a global vision. Ali is not a poet of quotidian concerns but he is always seeking to broaden the scope of his abstract thoughts. Additionally,Alis distrust of English (Words are nothing,/ just rumours) means that poetic forms become their own compensation in the face of grief. The mannered diction takes on a Bard-like gravitas and resonates through conventional forms that rely on heavy repetition. At times these repetitions feel too strong for the poems as they take our attention from the content. This is a deliberate style that finds solace in poetrys consoling powers when confronted by the subject of political conflict.

The revelation of this collection for me was the longer poems. In Rooms Are Never Finished,Alis grief for his mother is larger than mere self-absorption. From Amherst to Kashmir is a global poem for its range of references and its breathtaking control of Sapphic stanzas,blank verse tercets,ghazals and free verse. Ali ends the poem by dropping the register to expose his despair: How dare it shine on earth/ from which you have vanished? In the hands of a lesser poet,these italicised,accusatory lines are trite but for Ali the death of his mother is about loss related to religion,culture,philosophy and politics. At such times,when the poems reveal themselves with clarity we read Ali as a major poet.

Ali is known for having demonstrated the possibilities of the ghazal in the West,and one remarkable ghazal depends on the repetition of Arabic. The obsessive quality of the couplet that persistently returns to a single word finds its strength here for Ali aligns himself to the international complexities that include memory,history,religion,politics and loss. The concentrated form allows him to sympathise with his ancestors,Majnoon,Ishmael,Garcia Lorca,Mahmoud Darwish and Yehuda Amichai. The ghazal configures around many of the images that occupy Ali throughout the collection. He stridently ends this ghazal: They ask me to tell them what Shahid means / Listen: It means The Beloved in Persian,witness in Arabic. Each couplet in this ghazal is a powerful hermetic slogan about Arabic. Less convincing are some of the last ghazals in which our anticipation of the next instance of the key word often detracts from the sincerity of the tone.

The Kashmir poems of Alis middle period render Shelleys famous dictum that poetry is news that stays news literal by raising awareness of the political situation to his by now established American readership. The reportage style of these poems lends itself to the subject matter. In The Blessed Word… Ali writes: mass rapes,towns left in cinders,neighbourhoods torched. Power is hideous/ like barbers hands. This is deceptively simple writing that owes its allegiance to the political poetry of Osip Mandelstam,Nazim Hikmet,Czeslaw Milosz,and to the modernist style of decontextualised quotes.

Ali is a world-class poet who speaks for all human love and suffering in a poetry that embraces all faiths and often borders on disbelief: If you leave who will prove that my cry existed?/ Tell me what was I like before I existed.

Daljit Nagra is the author of Look We Have Coming to Dover!