The Country Without a Post Office: Poems 1991-1995

Here is a haunted and haunting volume that establishes Agha Shahid Ali as a seminal voice writing in English. Commenting on the American edition, first published in 1997, Edward Said observed: ‘The extraordinary formal precision and virtuosity of these poems, as well as their often searing imagery, derives from Agha Shahid Ali’s responses to Kashmir’s agony. But this is poetry whose appeal is universal, its voice unerringly eloquent: A marvellous achievement’. Amidst rain and fire and ruin, in a land of ‘doomed addresses’, the poet evokes the tragedy of his birthplace. These are stunning poems, intensely musical – steeped in history, myth, and politics – all merging into Agha Shahid Ali’s finest mode, that of longing’.