Ravishing disunities

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.