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A Nostalgist's Map of America: Poems
With his prologue poem "Eurydice," Agha Shahid Ali's Nostalgist introduces the motifs of journey and exile, myth and politics, history and loss, that animate this collection. Mapping America as he travels westward, the Nostalgist is an exile from his native Kashmir, and even from his first American home; his is the unique perspective of the outsider. These jeweled, intricate poems, like the multilayered "In Search of Evanescence," locate and reflect the America that must be "unseen to be believed."
Somewhere between cartographer and stargazer, the Nostalgist links images of water, desert, and myth, returning to Tucson in the monsoons, or seeing Chile in his rearview mirror, all the while creating an intense and vital vision.
Somewhere between cartographer and stargazer, the Nostalgist links images of water, desert, and myth, returning to Tucson in the monsoons, or seeing Chile in his rearview mirror, all the while creating an intense and vital vision.
- GenresPoetry
105 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1991
5 people are currently reading
233 people want to read
About the author
Agha Shahid Ali
24 books213 followersAgha Shahid Ali (आगा शाहीद अली) was an American poet of Kashmiri ancestry and upbringing.
His poetry collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, Rooms Are Never Finished (finalist for the National Book Award, 2001). His last book was Call Me Ishmael Tonight, a collection of English ghazals. His poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies.
Ali was also a translator of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (The Rebel's Silhouette; Selected Poems) and editor (Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English). He was widely credited for helping to popularize the ghazal form in America.
Ali taught at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as creative writing programs at University of Utah, Warren Wilson College and New York University. He died peacefully, in his sleep, of brain cancer in December, 2001. He was laid to rest in Northampton, Massachusetts.
His poetry collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, Rooms Are Never Finished (finalist for the National Book Award, 2001). His last book was Call Me Ishmael Tonight, a collection of English ghazals. His poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies.
Ali was also a translator of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (The Rebel's Silhouette; Selected Poems) and editor (Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English). He was widely credited for helping to popularize the ghazal form in America.
Ali taught at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as creative writing programs at University of Utah, Warren Wilson College and New York University. He died peacefully, in his sleep, of brain cancer in December, 2001. He was laid to rest in Northampton, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 18, 2017
I say this every time I read a book of poetry but I have no idea how to read poetry BUT here is a nice selection of lines where I probably should've cried:
And now the road is a river
polished silver by cars
The cars are urns
carrying ashes to the sea
--
Some ran ahead
the sun divided
among them, eclipses
hidden in their eyes
--
[...] arms. And we are driving by the ocean
that evaporated here, by its shores,
the past now happening so quickly that each
stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky
taking rapid notes on us as we turn
at Tucson Boulevard and drive into
the airport, and I realize that the earth
is thawing from longing into longing and
that we are being forgotten by those arms.
--
In this book everything is blue and shattered glass and every highway leads to India or Carthage or Tunis and every moon is crying silver onto a sad airplane windowsill. I think Ali loves these images, in this ascending order: deserts that used to be oceans, beams of light cutting open solid objects, sapphire silences that can consume two briefly road-tripping friends in one glittering hiccup.
And now the road is a river
polished silver by cars
The cars are urns
carrying ashes to the sea
--
Some ran ahead
the sun divided
among them, eclipses
hidden in their eyes
--
[...] arms. And we are driving by the ocean
that evaporated here, by its shores,
the past now happening so quickly that each
stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky
taking rapid notes on us as we turn
at Tucson Boulevard and drive into
the airport, and I realize that the earth
is thawing from longing into longing and
that we are being forgotten by those arms.
--
In this book everything is blue and shattered glass and every highway leads to India or Carthage or Tunis and every moon is crying silver onto a sad airplane windowsill. I think Ali loves these images, in this ascending order: deserts that used to be oceans, beams of light cutting open solid objects, sapphire silences that can consume two briefly road-tripping friends in one glittering hiccup.
April 5, 2015
“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December night.
“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”
“Yes, Yes,” he said. “especially on a clear day.”
[…]
And we are driving by the ocean
that evaporated here, by its shores,
the past now happening so quickly that each
stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky
taking rapid notes on us as we turn
at Tucson Boulevard and drive into
the airport, and I realize that the earth
is thawing from longing into longing and
that we are being forgotten by those arms.
* * *
At the airport I stared after her plane
till the window was
again a mirror.
As I drove back to the foothills, the fog
shut its doors behind me on Alvernon,
and I breathed the dried seas
the earth had lost,
their forsaken shores. And I remembered
another moment that refers only
to itself:
in New Delhi one night
as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out.
It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,
perhaps there were sirens,
air-raid warnings.
But the audience, hushed, did not stir.
The microphone was dead, but she went on
singing, and her voice
was coming from far
away, as if she had already died.
And just before the lights did flood her
again, melting the frost
of her diamond
into rays, it was, like this turning dark
of fog, a moment when only a lost sea
can be heard, a time
to recollect
every shadow, everything the earth was losing,
a time to think of everything the earth
and I had lost, of all
that I would lose,
of all that I was losing.
Serge told me in New York one December night.
“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”
“Yes, Yes,” he said. “especially on a clear day.”
[…]
And we are driving by the ocean
that evaporated here, by its shores,
the past now happening so quickly that each
stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky
taking rapid notes on us as we turn
at Tucson Boulevard and drive into
the airport, and I realize that the earth
is thawing from longing into longing and
that we are being forgotten by those arms.
* * *
At the airport I stared after her plane
till the window was
again a mirror.
As I drove back to the foothills, the fog
shut its doors behind me on Alvernon,
and I breathed the dried seas
the earth had lost,
their forsaken shores. And I remembered
another moment that refers only
to itself:
in New Delhi one night
as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out.
It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,
perhaps there were sirens,
air-raid warnings.
But the audience, hushed, did not stir.
The microphone was dead, but she went on
singing, and her voice
was coming from far
away, as if she had already died.
And just before the lights did flood her
again, melting the frost
of her diamond
into rays, it was, like this turning dark
of fog, a moment when only a lost sea
can be heard, a time
to recollect
every shadow, everything the earth was losing,
a time to think of everything the earth
and I had lost, of all
that I would lose,
of all that I was losing.
April 20, 2023
The feminine urge to read poetry under the eclipse
October 28, 2008
Mourning while moving is a way to describe the overarching theme of this book. But to say this is a bit reductive. This, Shahid's most cohesive manuscript, does not disappoint. I want to write a book this good. I've bought four copies: one for myself and have given away three. This is a book to be shared.
August 10, 2016
One clear victory for A Nostalgist's Map of America: Agha Shahid Ali chose a great, hugely appropriate title for it. It was quite emotionally difficult to read at times, in that it was suffused all through with sadness and loss -- especially the long poem "From Another Desert", which takes up all of Part III of the book's four parts. Of the images that repeat throughout the book, the one that stands out the most to me is that of Ali driving interminably, most often through the Southwest, bypassing locations while their stories (sometimes imagined) are recounted poem by poem, pervaded by a nostalgia that reaches the level of pain.
Yes, there are a few poems here that don't fit this scheme -- the Greek mythology ones, for example -- but Ali weaves those in anyway, drawing thematic or even explicit links between juxtaposed poems that might otherwise be missed. The book really appears to be very carefully sequenced, with the shorter poems of Part IV coming as cool relief after the exertions of "From Another Desert". Ali's greatest triumph here for me is the book's other long poem, "In Search of Evanescence", which combines far more themes and motifs than I would think could be rolled into one unit, including extended references to Emily Dickinson and Georgia O'Keeffe on top of what appear to be genuine pointers to Ali's personal life as a gay man -- a status that, apparently, he kept generally hidden in his writing.
All in all, A Nostalgist's Map of America resonated with me much more than Ali's earlier collection, The Half-Inch Himalayas, but didn't quite reach the level of the first of his books I read, the playful, posthumous Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals. Ali was yet to become a formalist poet by this point, and his free verse here is (if you'll excuse the oxymoron) packed with open spaces in a way that someone only familiar with his ghazals might be hard pressed to recognize. Although his poems in A Nostalgist's Map of America are filled with the myths that were conspicuously absent from The Half-Inch Himalayas, Ali still had a long road ahead of him before his final triumph. Next up: The Country Without a Post Office.
Yes, there are a few poems here that don't fit this scheme -- the Greek mythology ones, for example -- but Ali weaves those in anyway, drawing thematic or even explicit links between juxtaposed poems that might otherwise be missed. The book really appears to be very carefully sequenced, with the shorter poems of Part IV coming as cool relief after the exertions of "From Another Desert". Ali's greatest triumph here for me is the book's other long poem, "In Search of Evanescence", which combines far more themes and motifs than I would think could be rolled into one unit, including extended references to Emily Dickinson and Georgia O'Keeffe on top of what appear to be genuine pointers to Ali's personal life as a gay man -- a status that, apparently, he kept generally hidden in his writing.
All in all, A Nostalgist's Map of America resonated with me much more than Ali's earlier collection, The Half-Inch Himalayas, but didn't quite reach the level of the first of his books I read, the playful, posthumous Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals. Ali was yet to become a formalist poet by this point, and his free verse here is (if you'll excuse the oxymoron) packed with open spaces in a way that someone only familiar with his ghazals might be hard pressed to recognize. Although his poems in A Nostalgist's Map of America are filled with the myths that were conspicuously absent from The Half-Inch Himalayas, Ali still had a long road ahead of him before his final triumph. Next up: The Country Without a Post Office.
April 26, 2017
favorite poem is the titular poem, "A Nostalgist's Map of America" <3
February 2, 2018
I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror (excerpts)
Once I went through a mirror—
from there too the world, so intact, resembled
only itself. When I returned I tore
the skin off the glass. The sea was unsealed
by dark, and I saw ships sink off the coast
of a wounded republic. Now from a blur
of tanks in Santiago, a white horse
gallops, riderless, chased by drunk soldiers
in a jeep; they’re firing into the moon. [...]
I see Peru without rain, Brazil
without forests—and here in Utah a dagger
of sunlight: it’s splitting—it’s the summer
solstice—the quartz center of a spiral.
Did the Anasazi know the darker
answer also—given now in crystal
by the mirrored continent? The solstice,
but of winter? A beam stabs the window,
diamonds him, a funeral in his eyes.
In the lit stadium of Santiago,
this is the shortest day. He’s taken there.
Those about to die are looking at him,
his eyes the ledger of the disappeared.
What will the mirror try now?
***
Snow On The Desert (excerpts)
“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December night.
“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”
“Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.” [...]
“And you know the flowers
of the saguaros bloom only at night?”
We are driving slowly, the road is glass.
“Imagine where we are was a sea once.
Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly
sapphire, and the past is happening quickly:
the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched
out their arms to rays millions of years old,
in each ray a secret of the planet’s
origin, the rays hurting each cactus
into memory, a human memory
for they are human, the Papagos say:
not only because they have arms and veins
and secrets. But because they too are a tribe,
vulnerable to massacre. “It is like
the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,”
Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved
arms. And we are driving by the ocean
that evaporated here, by its shores [...]
***
Medusa (excerpts)
I must be beautiful,
Or why would men be speechless
at my sight? I have populated the countryside
with animals of stone
and put nations painlessly to sleep. [...]
Then why let anything remain
when whatever we loved
turned instantly to stone?
I am waiting for the Mediterranean
to see me: It will petrify.
And as caravans from Africa begin to cross it,
I will freeze their cargo of slaves.
Soon, soon, the sky will have eyes:
I will fossilize its dome into cracked blue,
I who am about to come
into God's full view
from the wrong side of the mirror
into which He gazes.
Once I went through a mirror—
from there too the world, so intact, resembled
only itself. When I returned I tore
the skin off the glass. The sea was unsealed
by dark, and I saw ships sink off the coast
of a wounded republic. Now from a blur
of tanks in Santiago, a white horse
gallops, riderless, chased by drunk soldiers
in a jeep; they’re firing into the moon. [...]
I see Peru without rain, Brazil
without forests—and here in Utah a dagger
of sunlight: it’s splitting—it’s the summer
solstice—the quartz center of a spiral.
Did the Anasazi know the darker
answer also—given now in crystal
by the mirrored continent? The solstice,
but of winter? A beam stabs the window,
diamonds him, a funeral in his eyes.
In the lit stadium of Santiago,
this is the shortest day. He’s taken there.
Those about to die are looking at him,
his eyes the ledger of the disappeared.
What will the mirror try now?
***
Snow On The Desert (excerpts)
“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December night.
“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”
“Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.” [...]
“And you know the flowers
of the saguaros bloom only at night?”
We are driving slowly, the road is glass.
“Imagine where we are was a sea once.
Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly
sapphire, and the past is happening quickly:
the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched
out their arms to rays millions of years old,
in each ray a secret of the planet’s
origin, the rays hurting each cactus
into memory, a human memory
for they are human, the Papagos say:
not only because they have arms and veins
and secrets. But because they too are a tribe,
vulnerable to massacre. “It is like
the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,”
Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved
arms. And we are driving by the ocean
that evaporated here, by its shores [...]
***
Medusa (excerpts)
I must be beautiful,
Or why would men be speechless
at my sight? I have populated the countryside
with animals of stone
and put nations painlessly to sleep. [...]
Then why let anything remain
when whatever we loved
turned instantly to stone?
I am waiting for the Mediterranean
to see me: It will petrify.
And as caravans from Africa begin to cross it,
I will freeze their cargo of slaves.
Soon, soon, the sky will have eyes:
I will fossilize its dome into cracked blue,
I who am about to come
into God's full view
from the wrong side of the mirror
into which He gazes.
June 3, 2025
My introduction to ASA's poetry was through Rooms Are Never Finished, a gorgeous heartbreaking book in every way. Much of his poetry that I read after that was also either geographically about the subcontinent or had similar religious/spiritual themes to Rooms Are Never Finished (Call me Ishmael, Karbala, etc).
So when I started this book some years ago I just couldn't understand it. It may have been that I was going through a very introductory phase of discovering what I liked reading in poetry and familiar (personal) themes were easier to grasp. I left it unfinished then. However, revisiting it now many years later, I am in awe. This is one of his best works. It's beautiful start to finish. As I was reading it, I knew there were certain poems I'd be pointing out as my favorite (Crucifixion, No,, From Another Desert, The Youngest of Graeae) but I wasn't expecting the last one to be as beautiful as it was (Snow on the Desert). It blew everything else away. It's a once in a lifetime poem. And I really believe you have to read the book in its linear order to fully appreciate the ending.
What a gift he gave this world and how lucky we are to hold it!
So when I started this book some years ago I just couldn't understand it. It may have been that I was going through a very introductory phase of discovering what I liked reading in poetry and familiar (personal) themes were easier to grasp. I left it unfinished then. However, revisiting it now many years later, I am in awe. This is one of his best works. It's beautiful start to finish. As I was reading it, I knew there were certain poems I'd be pointing out as my favorite (Crucifixion, No,, From Another Desert, The Youngest of Graeae) but I wasn't expecting the last one to be as beautiful as it was (Snow on the Desert). It blew everything else away. It's a once in a lifetime poem. And I really believe you have to read the book in its linear order to fully appreciate the ending.
What a gift he gave this world and how lucky we are to hold it!
October 28, 2020
'A Rehearsal of Loss'
The night rose from the rocks of the Canyon.
I drove away from your door. And the night,
it left the earth the way a broken man,
his lover's door closing behind him, leaves
that street in silence for the rest of his life.
The night rose from the rocks of the Canyon.
I drove away from your door. And the night,
it left the earth the way a broken man,
his lover's door closing behind him, leaves
that street in silence for the rest of his life.
February 15, 2020
Such a beautiful labyrinth of words. ❤️
June 14, 2021
This is one of my favorite poetry collections I've ever read. Absolutely incredible from start to finish.
September 10, 2021
3.5 Stars
November 22, 2010
Poems of loss and dispossession. Each one a song floating in on the sea.
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October 24, 2014currently-reading
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews