POETS’ CORNER

ROOMS ARE NEVER FINISHED, By Agha Shahid Ali, W.W. Norton: 106 pp., $22

Those who do not understand poetry think it alters (as Shakespeare said of false love) on impulse, changes its essence with the introduction of new linguistic or philosophical movements, academic theories or trends. They fail to grasp the timeless nature of the art. Beyond Frost’s slyly observed: “a temporary stay against confusion”--it is language in simultaneous stillness and movement--its profound liberation from the temporal allows it to connect the centuries. This is why Sappho, Catullus and Tu Fu sound as “contemporary” as any poet of the 21st century.

Agha Shahid Ali’s voice possesses this contemporary agelessness. Ali grew up in Kashmir, a citizen of that small mountainous country torn apart by religious wars, its colonial past and present status as disputed territory between Pakistan and India. In an earlier book of poems, “The Country Without a Post Office,” he mourned the devastation visited on his childhood home--once a paradise, offering the legendary jewel of Dal Lake near the ascent into the Himalayas, just a few hundred miles from China. In his new book of poems, “Rooms Are Never Finished,” he draws on memories of Kashmir again, but now within the context of his mother’s death and the return of her body to Kashmir.

What is timeless in these poems is the power of grief--sheer cliffs and drops of despair that he masters and spins into verse with astonishing technical virtuosity, employing his favorite form, the ancient ghazal, a leitmotif shaping a solemn impassioned music:

*

I enter this: The Beloved leaves one behind to die.

For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir,

and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the universe

when I remember you--beyond all accounting--O my mother? *

Besides Buddha and the Koran, there are echoes here of Judaic scripture. Ali is the voice of the whirlwind, the form once taken by the deity in the Old Testament. As the ghazal form weaves itself into the echoing tapestry of grief--readers follow the patterns, rapt--discerning chanting beyond the words. It is as if the high keening cry of elephants driven to their death by invaders of Kashmir--the sound that his dying mother likened to the sirens outside her hospital room on Lenox Avenue in New York--rises in unbearable importuning. Those of us who have visited Kashmir will find another country in these poems, different from the traveler’s version; it is not only the country of grief, it is the country of grief personified. It is grief made personal and everlasting as the poet’s vision of his mother’s face.

COOL, CALM & COLLECTED: Poems 1960-2000, By Carolyn Kizer, Copper Canyon Press: 500 pp., $30

Carolyn Kizer’s new book of poems is called “Cool, Calm & Collected.” Though this book is, without question, a sizeable “collection”--it seems hardly cool or calm. What one feels, looking over the poems and translations, spanning 40 years of this distinguished poet’s life, are larger-than-life ego, wit, passion and sass. “Shucks a’mighty,” she cries, quoting a small-town conventioneer in an early poem. “If you’re an eagle, you just go.” Kizer’s aerie is high above the Poetry Wars, though she occasionally divebombs the odd pretentious literary gasbag or poet-lout. And when she swoops to hunt, she celebrates the chaos below with a distinctive chortling cry:

*

God save a disorderly world, and the wild United Nations!

The twelve holy hogsheads will roll forth on their keg legs

And save us all: poets, Mongolians, landlords & ladies, mad musicians.

Hooray for purple and gold, for liquor and angels!

*

This collection contains some invigorating memoir-like prose as well as a few unpublished poems and translations. The poems can be read as a kind of biography-in-verse. And an amazing life it has been for this ground-floor feminist (her “Pro Femina” sounded the call to arms long before the ‘70s women’s movement), this Pulitzer Prize-winning powerhouse of a poet. Kizer is a scrapper--what would we ever do without her bracing poems in her cigarettes-and-whiskey, Lauren Bacall-leaning-on-a-doorjamb voice--lyricizing or bad-mouthing ex-lovers, cheerfully kvetching (“What good are children anyhow?/They only break your heart”) or offering startling observation (“Did you ever see someone coldcock a blind nun? /Well, I did.”)

What would we do without that quick rapier slash--”The finest intellect can be a bore”--or the turn of a fine lyric (“The whole green sky is dying”) or the absolutely fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants inventive translations? The answer is: We cannot do without Kizer and never could--here are four decades of compelling reasons why.