What do you think?
Rate this book
Rooms Are Never Finished: Poems
"An incomparable work, an unmatched achievement."―Anthony Hecht In this stunningly inventive collection―a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in poetry―Ali excavates the devastation wrought upon his childhood home, Kashmir, and reveals a more personal devastation: his mother's death and the journey with her body back to Kashmir.
108 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2001
About the author
Agha Shahid Ali
26 books218 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 24 of 25 reviews
December 20, 2008
Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri-American poet who I don't think is very well known in the US. Years ago, I happened to hear one of his poems on the radio while I was driving and was completely blown away. Finally, I found a used copy of his poems. The "theme" of this book is his mother's death due to an illness, and him taking her body back to Kashmir per her wishes. As with any compilation, I was moved by the some poems, and not so much by the others. I especially liked his ghazals (a type of poetry with roots in pre-Islamic Arabia and popularized by Sufi mystics like Rumi). Here is how one of favorite poems from the book starts:
What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief's lottery, bought even the rain.
"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"
Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?
After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.
Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you'd poured--what?--even the rain.
Most of the poems have a sense of nostalgia, melancholy, and/or longing to them. This is fairly typical of the ghazal style so they don't always make for a "fun" read...but still worth it I think.
What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief's lottery, bought even the rain.
"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"
Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?
After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.
Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you'd poured--what?--even the rain.
Most of the poems have a sense of nostalgia, melancholy, and/or longing to them. This is fairly typical of the ghazal style so they don't always make for a "fun" read...but still worth it I think.
Read
September 10, 2025'I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World', 'Violins', and 'By the Waters of the Sind' were my favourites.
February 19, 2024
Beautiful collection of poems. I'm not very familiar with the history of Kashmir, so I'm excited to dive into this work more in class this week.
February 7, 2026
There were many interesting lines, but none of the work captured my attention. Almost felt like a burden trying to finish this collection…
August 7, 2026
This is my fourth book of poems by Agha Shahid Ali, and my favorite. Ali started out, in The Half-Inch Himalayas, writing free verse, and gradually became a formalist poet, culminating in the posthumous Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals, a sparkling book of ghazals. But his penultimate book, Rooms Are Never Finished, written in the wake of his mother’s death, I think is even better. A few ghazals are accompanied here by experiments in other forms, such as the canzone of the opening “Lenox Hill”, sapphics in various places, and the terza rima of the majestic, concluding “I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World”, which I believe is now my favorite of all Ali’s poems.
Other than “Lenox Hill”, a fabulous use of the canzone form to describe Ali’s memories of his dying mother (the title refers to a New York hospital), Rooms Are Never Finished is divided into four parts, only one of which, the second, contains more than a single poem. Part I consists of “From Amherst to Kashmir”, itself a twelve-part poem mourning the poet’s mother, interwoven with images of the Shi’a Muslim holiday of Ashura that mourns Hussain, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, killed in battle at Karbala (in current-day Iraq). I did think “From Amherst to Kashmir” felt a bit slack in the middle, when, after a gripping recounting of Karbala in near-prose, several sections about this history and Ali’s mother’s both in and out of form, and even a translation of a Faiz Ahmed Faiz lyric, “Memory”, described earlier in the poem as supposedly unstranslatable, Ali, I thought, rides too much on the sapphic stanza (quatrains of eleven, eleven, eleven and five syllables each) to link his stories together. It is a small complaint about what is overall already a splendid poem.
Sapphics redeem themselves, too, in my favorite poem in Part II of the book, “A Secular Comedy”, which (appropriately enough for the form) is about a same-sex relationship, if you can call it that. Ali, who was gay without ever explicitly mentioning the fact in his poetry, takes ideas from both Sufism and Milton to imagine God and Satan themselves as former lovers, God having then rejected Satan and pushed him out of Heaven. Ali’s note on the poem begins, “One Sufi interpretation of the God/Satan myth portrays Satan (Iblis) as being in love with God, and thus the jealous lover when God asks him to bow to Adam”, but the poem itself implies something more intimate: “What lovely reminder, this / wine, of that passion — // Heaven’s nights, His blood, then His flesh, my open / wings that tightly closed to again be opened…”
Part II also contains three ghazals that would later be reprinted in Call Me Ishmael Tonight, of which especially the first, beginning “What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?” is incredibly dense, stuffed with images, and full of longing. In the midst of the non-ghazals in Part II, the compactness of this poem packs a punch it somewhat seems to lack to me in Call Me Ishmael Tonight. Although this section also contains the disappointing, six-word “On Hearing a Lover Not Seen for Twenty Years Has Attempted Suicide”, I think it ends very strongly, with the eerie “The Purse-Seiner Atlantis”, “a phantom-ship with birds, no, moths, // giant moths that cannot die.” Some of the imagery — moths flying into flames — echoes “From Amherst to Kashmir”, while the tenderness the poem shows to its dedicatee, Elena Karina Byrne — “Beautiful in white, she says, ‘I’ll just be back.’ / She goes inside. I fill my glass till I see // everything and nothing stare back at me…” — is astonishing. “The Purse-Seiner Atlantis” is written in stanzas of three lines, all of approximately equal length, but otherwise, as far as I can tell, releases the constraints of form for the moment.
Surprisingly, thereupon, Part III of the book, the poem “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia”, reveals itself to be, in fact, Ali’s translation of a Mahmoud Darwish poem. Or, more accurately, Ali’s “version” of one — he seems to have not known Arabic, Darwish’s language, and relied on a comparison to a literal English translation of the poem, gone over line by line with a professor of Arabic, Ahmad Dallal. Having attempted and, so far, failed to make much headway in a Fady Joudah-translated collection of Darwish’s poetry, The Butterfly's Burden, I was skeptical at first, but “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” won me over really pretty soon. Darwish in the English of Ali is simply incredible. Here, the Palestinian poet imagines himself to be an Arab kicked out of Andalusia in, seemingly, 1492 — “seven hundred years”, the duration of existence of Al-Andalus, recurs in the poem — the themes of exile in “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” of course being explicitly appropriate to Darwish’s own situation, the poet having lived most of his life in exile from Palestine.
Really, “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia”, I believe for the first time, made me get Darwish. Previously, in reading the love poems that open The Butterfly’s Burden, I felt like he was a poet I couldn’t get a handle on, the poems too romantic, gushing, and full of allusions I didn’t understand, which I chalked up to his writing deeply within a tradition of poetry in Arabic I was unfamiliar with. But, I decided while reading “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia”, the gush is so much of the point. I’d previously, I decided, been reading Darwish with too much of a poet’s eye, trying to figure out how he does what he does, and running into plenty of static trying to figure out the individual meaning of every element in his poems. But really, “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” is breathtakingly beautiful. It also seems to belong to its own form, separate from anything Ali had brought to the previous part of Rooms Are Never Finished, with its long lines, repetitions and evocative ellipses. It’s so distinctive that the only really formalist gesture in the poem, its eleventh and final section, “Violins” — written in couplets in which every line starts with the title — was, for me, a deep letdown. Regardless, though, by the end of “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia”, Darwish’s majestic poetic voice has, in my opinion, taken over Rooms Are Never Finished from Ali’s own. I’m very much looking forward to restarting The Butterfly’s Burden when I get access to it again.
The stakes, in other words, are raised immensely after Part III. Will Rooms Are Never Finished be ultimately dominated by the voice of a poet other than Ali himself? But then, Part IV is “I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World”, and here, Ali meets the challenge he set for himself head-on, fusing Darwish’s sensibility into his own (the density of the earlier ghazals returns here) and proving himself the poetic equal of, at the least, Darwish as represented in Ali’s own English. Eight pages long without subsections, written in a loose terza rima that must be meant to invoke Dante himself, referring to James Merrill throughout as “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” had Lorca, “I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World” begins by imagining Ali stepping into a ferry over the waters of the dead, rowed by a figure from his childhood whom he refers to as Gula, in search of the shade of his mother. The conclusion of this mythopoeic plot is stunning, but I’m not going to spoil it here. After some occasionally laborious formal devices in the earlier part of Rooms Are Never Finished, the terza rima in this poem shimmers between presence and absence, able to disappear momentarily in an attempt to read the poem as free verse, only to reassert itself gently, as a distant, awakening recollection. It’s a natural final synthesis of everything that came before it in the book, and an absolutely stunning conclusion.
Other than “Lenox Hill”, a fabulous use of the canzone form to describe Ali’s memories of his dying mother (the title refers to a New York hospital), Rooms Are Never Finished is divided into four parts, only one of which, the second, contains more than a single poem. Part I consists of “From Amherst to Kashmir”, itself a twelve-part poem mourning the poet’s mother, interwoven with images of the Shi’a Muslim holiday of Ashura that mourns Hussain, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, killed in battle at Karbala (in current-day Iraq). I did think “From Amherst to Kashmir” felt a bit slack in the middle, when, after a gripping recounting of Karbala in near-prose, several sections about this history and Ali’s mother’s both in and out of form, and even a translation of a Faiz Ahmed Faiz lyric, “Memory”, described earlier in the poem as supposedly unstranslatable, Ali, I thought, rides too much on the sapphic stanza (quatrains of eleven, eleven, eleven and five syllables each) to link his stories together. It is a small complaint about what is overall already a splendid poem.
Sapphics redeem themselves, too, in my favorite poem in Part II of the book, “A Secular Comedy”, which (appropriately enough for the form) is about a same-sex relationship, if you can call it that. Ali, who was gay without ever explicitly mentioning the fact in his poetry, takes ideas from both Sufism and Milton to imagine God and Satan themselves as former lovers, God having then rejected Satan and pushed him out of Heaven. Ali’s note on the poem begins, “One Sufi interpretation of the God/Satan myth portrays Satan (Iblis) as being in love with God, and thus the jealous lover when God asks him to bow to Adam”, but the poem itself implies something more intimate: “What lovely reminder, this / wine, of that passion — // Heaven’s nights, His blood, then His flesh, my open / wings that tightly closed to again be opened…”
Part II also contains three ghazals that would later be reprinted in Call Me Ishmael Tonight, of which especially the first, beginning “What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?” is incredibly dense, stuffed with images, and full of longing. In the midst of the non-ghazals in Part II, the compactness of this poem packs a punch it somewhat seems to lack to me in Call Me Ishmael Tonight. Although this section also contains the disappointing, six-word “On Hearing a Lover Not Seen for Twenty Years Has Attempted Suicide”, I think it ends very strongly, with the eerie “The Purse-Seiner Atlantis”, “a phantom-ship with birds, no, moths, // giant moths that cannot die.” Some of the imagery — moths flying into flames — echoes “From Amherst to Kashmir”, while the tenderness the poem shows to its dedicatee, Elena Karina Byrne — “Beautiful in white, she says, ‘I’ll just be back.’ / She goes inside. I fill my glass till I see // everything and nothing stare back at me…” — is astonishing. “The Purse-Seiner Atlantis” is written in stanzas of three lines, all of approximately equal length, but otherwise, as far as I can tell, releases the constraints of form for the moment.
Surprisingly, thereupon, Part III of the book, the poem “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia”, reveals itself to be, in fact, Ali’s translation of a Mahmoud Darwish poem. Or, more accurately, Ali’s “version” of one — he seems to have not known Arabic, Darwish’s language, and relied on a comparison to a literal English translation of the poem, gone over line by line with a professor of Arabic, Ahmad Dallal. Having attempted and, so far, failed to make much headway in a Fady Joudah-translated collection of Darwish’s poetry, The Butterfly's Burden, I was skeptical at first, but “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” won me over really pretty soon. Darwish in the English of Ali is simply incredible. Here, the Palestinian poet imagines himself to be an Arab kicked out of Andalusia in, seemingly, 1492 — “seven hundred years”, the duration of existence of Al-Andalus, recurs in the poem — the themes of exile in “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” of course being explicitly appropriate to Darwish’s own situation, the poet having lived most of his life in exile from Palestine.
Really, “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia”, I believe for the first time, made me get Darwish. Previously, in reading the love poems that open The Butterfly’s Burden, I felt like he was a poet I couldn’t get a handle on, the poems too romantic, gushing, and full of allusions I didn’t understand, which I chalked up to his writing deeply within a tradition of poetry in Arabic I was unfamiliar with. But, I decided while reading “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia”, the gush is so much of the point. I’d previously, I decided, been reading Darwish with too much of a poet’s eye, trying to figure out how he does what he does, and running into plenty of static trying to figure out the individual meaning of every element in his poems. But really, “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” is breathtakingly beautiful. It also seems to belong to its own form, separate from anything Ali had brought to the previous part of Rooms Are Never Finished, with its long lines, repetitions and evocative ellipses. It’s so distinctive that the only really formalist gesture in the poem, its eleventh and final section, “Violins” — written in couplets in which every line starts with the title — was, for me, a deep letdown. Regardless, though, by the end of “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia”, Darwish’s majestic poetic voice has, in my opinion, taken over Rooms Are Never Finished from Ali’s own. I’m very much looking forward to restarting The Butterfly’s Burden when I get access to it again.
The stakes, in other words, are raised immensely after Part III. Will Rooms Are Never Finished be ultimately dominated by the voice of a poet other than Ali himself? But then, Part IV is “I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World”, and here, Ali meets the challenge he set for himself head-on, fusing Darwish’s sensibility into his own (the density of the earlier ghazals returns here) and proving himself the poetic equal of, at the least, Darwish as represented in Ali’s own English. Eight pages long without subsections, written in a loose terza rima that must be meant to invoke Dante himself, referring to James Merrill throughout as “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” had Lorca, “I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World” begins by imagining Ali stepping into a ferry over the waters of the dead, rowed by a figure from his childhood whom he refers to as Gula, in search of the shade of his mother. The conclusion of this mythopoeic plot is stunning, but I’m not going to spoil it here. After some occasionally laborious formal devices in the earlier part of Rooms Are Never Finished, the terza rima in this poem shimmers between presence and absence, able to disappear momentarily in an attempt to read the poem as free verse, only to reassert itself gently, as a distant, awakening recollection. It’s a natural final synthesis of everything that came before it in the book, and an absolutely stunning conclusion.
February 7, 2017
Beautiful collection if you can get past the tears that the first few poems evokes. The underlying theme of the poems is grief and loss - at the death of his mother, at the inevitable change in his life and the loss of his home. And yet, there is so much more emotion contained here.
This book is my introduction to the late poet and I would like to read some of his earlier works.
This book is my introduction to the late poet and I would like to read some of his earlier works.
October 28, 2008
Absolutely stunning. The first poem in the volume, "Lenox Hill" made me weep at Barnes & Noble the first time I read it. Some of Shahid's best ghazals also included.
October 6, 2025
Ali's collection might seem slim, and the number of words/lines/stanzas on each page might create the impression that this is a quick read. The impression is fallacious.
He draws on, adapts, plunders, and repeats multiple sources to craft his lines, which not only demand complete attention but also multiple readings to get even a sliver of what he seems to communicate.
The book's description as merely detailing Ali's grief over the death of his mother, the transportation of her body to Kashmir, and the devastation of Kashmir itself (and Palestine, though not mentioned in the blurb), while not wrong, is far from an accurate picture of what the poet is painting and working with.
Nonetheless, the difficult read is rewarding, and even on my first reading, while many references and lines still escape me, the few stanzas and poems I somewhat understood clicked with me intellectually and emotionally.
If there is a critique to be made, only an extremely subjective one is possible (one that will submerge into nothingness given the multiple deserved 5-star reviews on Goodreads). I wish the mother, whose death is tied to and explored through the devastation of various homelands and scriptural material, were granted a bit more complexity outside of being an idealised "universe" (only hinted at when Shahid [the narrator] mentions arguing with her in the last poem). Perhaps that is the point, one that highlights the limitations of the forms Ali works with, or perhaps it highlights the need for me to return to this collection multiple times.
He draws on, adapts, plunders, and repeats multiple sources to craft his lines, which not only demand complete attention but also multiple readings to get even a sliver of what he seems to communicate.
The book's description as merely detailing Ali's grief over the death of his mother, the transportation of her body to Kashmir, and the devastation of Kashmir itself (and Palestine, though not mentioned in the blurb), while not wrong, is far from an accurate picture of what the poet is painting and working with.
Nonetheless, the difficult read is rewarding, and even on my first reading, while many references and lines still escape me, the few stanzas and poems I somewhat understood clicked with me intellectually and emotionally.
If there is a critique to be made, only an extremely subjective one is possible (one that will submerge into nothingness given the multiple deserved 5-star reviews on Goodreads). I wish the mother, whose death is tied to and explored through the devastation of various homelands and scriptural material, were granted a bit more complexity outside of being an idealised "universe" (only hinted at when Shahid [the narrator] mentions arguing with her in the last poem). Perhaps that is the point, one that highlights the limitations of the forms Ali works with, or perhaps it highlights the need for me to return to this collection multiple times.
March 15, 2022
Stunning, heartbreaking, luminous, stunning.
This was my first collection by Ali, and I was absolutely captivated. A master of the ghazal and a poet for exiles, Ali asks you to gently see your world newly, to see grief and love and war and creation and being in lamplight and birdsong. I will return to these over and over again. I am already returning.
"that How dare the moon—I want to cry out,
Mother—shine so hauntingly out
here when I've sentenced it to black waves
inside me? Why has it not perished?
How dare it shine on an earth
from which you have vanished?"
-By the Waters of the Sind
This was my first collection by Ali, and I was absolutely captivated. A master of the ghazal and a poet for exiles, Ali asks you to gently see your world newly, to see grief and love and war and creation and being in lamplight and birdsong. I will return to these over and over again. I am already returning.
"that How dare the moon—I want to cry out,
Mother—shine so hauntingly out
here when I've sentenced it to black waves
inside me? Why has it not perished?
How dare it shine on an earth
from which you have vanished?"
-By the Waters of the Sind
July 31, 2020
I loved the ghazals and Secular Comedy. I always find this style of poetry difficult but I feel drawn to Ali because we are both Kashmiri. His grief for his mother was so palpable especially in the beginning poems. Grief is written thickly, splattered across the pages, as well as a refreshingly intimate parlay with God (including moments of chastisement). The two poems about suicide m were painfully reductive to me. The motif of the slavery as well.
August 20, 2018
How was this a Finalist and not a winner? I'll never understand. A masterpiece by Agha Shahid Ali. It speaks of death and emptiness better than you'd imagine and once you read , you'll think, how did Agha imagine that? Couldn't put down, even once. 5/5.
February 17, 2025
- She is farther than any god today
and nearer than any god.
And God?
He’s farther, farther from us, forever far.
We lift the shrine.
The women break into
There is no god but.
- Memory’s dim places.
Let me weep, let this blood
flow from my eyes.
and nearer than any god.
And God?
He’s farther, farther from us, forever far.
We lift the shrine.
The women break into
There is no god but.
- Memory’s dim places.
Let me weep, let this blood
flow from my eyes.
February 21, 2017
I dont understand the hype about this book, nothing special, there is some lyricism, but it is normal prose.
August 22, 2018
These are heavy but so, so good. I'm going to be thinking about these poems for a long time.
August 30, 2023
~3.75
November 16, 2024
Maybe rooms don't get finished, but so glad that this collection was so it could be published.
April 18, 2026
A beautiful collection, I was drawn to the poems of Andalusia.
February 16, 2022
“Will I be / the one to close the last door of the sky, I, the last gasp of an / Arab?”
“Will I wait here, alone, by this ebony abyss, / abandoned by you, alone?”
Such a beautiful tribute to his mother, and such a special perspective on religion, exile, and loss.
“Will I wait here, alone, by this ebony abyss, / abandoned by you, alone?”
Such a beautiful tribute to his mother, and such a special perspective on religion, exile, and loss.
April 11, 2015
This was fabulous. I loved the way Agha's writing flows; every poem is a little masterpiece. "A Secular Comedy" was especially wonderful, as was "Summers of Translation," the third section of "From Amherst to Kashmir".
Every poem was brilliantly crafted; this is a bit from the title poem: "But for small invisible hands, no wall/ would be lacquered a rain forest's colors. Before,/ these walls had just mirrors (I tried on--for size--/kismet's barest air)". The poems were elegant, meaningful, packed with rich imagery, the heartbreak of loss, and the power death exerts on a family.
As a side note, I have completely fallen in love with the form of the ghazal. My favorite fixed poetic form is the sestina, but this one is tied with the pantoum as the second place form in my heart for its sheer beauty. Agha really understands the form and realizes it perfectly.
Every poem was brilliantly crafted; this is a bit from the title poem: "But for small invisible hands, no wall/ would be lacquered a rain forest's colors. Before,/ these walls had just mirrors (I tried on--for size--/kismet's barest air)". The poems were elegant, meaningful, packed with rich imagery, the heartbreak of loss, and the power death exerts on a family.
As a side note, I have completely fallen in love with the form of the ghazal. My favorite fixed poetic form is the sestina, but this one is tied with the pantoum as the second place form in my heart for its sheer beauty. Agha really understands the form and realizes it perfectly.
September 13, 2007
About being somewhere, but not really being there. Almost all the poems are about mourning, so they're better read on a rainy day or late in the day.
July 26, 2014
In the mystical poetic tradition of the masters of Sufi verse.
August 30, 2015
A beautiful collection of poetry in grief, faith, and hope.
August 14, 2007
Not a big fan of the ghazal.
Read
June 17, 2017Excellent composition and interplay of His mothers death, karbala and violence in kashmir
Displaying 1 - 24 of 25 reviews