Ravishing disunities - The Library of the Uncommons

195 pages

English language

Published May 9, 2000 by Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England.

ISBN:: 978-0-8195-6438-2

(1 review)

This star-studded anthology infuses English poetry with the rigor and wit of a foreign form. In recent years, the ghazal (pronounced "ghuzzle"), a traditional Arabic form of poetry, has become popular among contemporary English language poets. But like the haiku before it, the ghazal has been widely misunderstood and thus most English ghazals have been far from the mark in both letter and spirit. This anthology brings together ghazals by a rich gathering of 107 poets including Diane Ackerman, John Hollander, W. S. Merwin, William Matthews, Paul Muldoon, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and many others. As this dazzling collection shows, the intricate and self-reflexive ghazal brings the writer a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Agha Shahid Ali's lively introduction gives a brief history of the ghazal and instructions on how to compose one in English. An elegant afterword by Sarah Suleri Goodyear elucidates the larger issues of cultural translation and …

This star-studded anthology infuses English poetry with the rigor and wit of a foreign form. In recent years, the ghazal (pronounced "ghuzzle"), a traditional Arabic form of poetry, has become popular among contemporary English language poets. But like the haiku before it, the ghazal has been widely misunderstood and thus most English ghazals have been far from the mark in both letter and spirit. This anthology brings together ghazals by a rich gathering of 107 poets including Diane Ackerman, John Hollander, W. S. Merwin, William Matthews, Paul Muldoon, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and many others. As this dazzling collection shows, the intricate and self-reflexive ghazal brings the writer a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Agha Shahid Ali's lively introduction gives a brief history of the ghazal and instructions on how to compose one in English. An elegant afterword by Sarah Suleri Goodyear elucidates the larger issues of cultural translation and authenticity inherent in writing in a "borrowed" form. - Publisher.

1 edition

4thace reviewed Ravishing disunities by Agha, Shahid Ali (Wesleyan poetry)

A variety of English language poems in the middle eastern tradition

4 stars

This is a collection of ghazals by over a hundred poets writing in English. This poetic form features a set of separate couplets, usually less than thirty lines in all, each with a short refrain, a word or a phrase, which is usually but not always preceded by a rhyme or slant rhyme. The images that come up shift kaleidoscopically in a way that is calculated to bring out different aspects of the repeated elements. In the last couplet, many but not all feature a reference to the person writing the poem. I have tried writing ghazals of my own before and have even had a couple published, but I did learn a lot about potential techniques that hadn't occurred to me. Not every poem spoke to me with equal force. I noticed that the ones which departed more from the traditional rules of the form often had less impact …

This is a collection of ghazals by over a hundred poets writing in English. This poetic form features a set of separate couplets, usually less than thirty lines in all, each with a short refrain, a word or a phrase, which is usually but not always preceded by a rhyme or slant rhyme. The images that come up shift kaleidoscopically in a way that is calculated to bring out different aspects of the repeated elements. In the last couplet, many but not all feature a reference to the person writing the poem. I have tried writing ghazals of my own before and have even had a couple published, but I did learn a lot about potential techniques that hadn't occurred to me. Not every poem spoke to me with equal force. I noticed that the ones which departed more from the traditional rules of the form often had less impact than the strict ones. But even those gave good clues of how to express oneself within the limitations of a ghazal in novel, surprising ways. For a reader who is looking to read poetry for pleasure, not as something to plunder for their own writing, I think this would be a good volume to get a feel for how a poet can be inventive within an unfamiliar form and discover how that can unlock expressive possibilities. The introduction and afterwords here are invaluable in understanding how this works. In the over twenty years since this book came out I see that this form has become less unfamiliar to Western audiences but that not many other anthologies of ghazals composed in English have been printed, making this one still relevant.

Subjects

Ghazals, American.