The Last Speaker

Agha Shahid Ali created poems that mesmerize and dazzle as they embrace his aesthetics and capture his landscapes of the heart. The poems in The Last Speaker allow the reader to be immersed in history, memory, and nostalgia that Agha Shahid Ali wove into the tapestries he created as he evolved as a poet. Ranging from free verse to traditional poetic forms, his poetry encompasses canzones, sestinas, sonnets, sapphics, pantoums, villanelles, prose poems, and, of course, ghazals in English. Since his death in 2001, scholarly articles and dissertations continue to delve into the craft of Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry. This selection offers a new lens that, while highlighting what are now his ‘classic’ poems, also brings to the forefront other poems that are even more haunting.