by Aaron Smith

Created on: June 14, 2009

Note: This is an essay I wrote about six months ago, entitled "A Bridge to the Void," about the late Agha Shahid Ali's outstanding book of poetry, The Country Without A Post Office. I was not thinking about the power of poetry when I wrote it, but in retrospect, Shahid's book remains the most convincing evidence I've seen from a contemporary poet that poetry and language-beyond having lasting aesthetic value-have the power to shape and change our world.

"Here the waters rise; our each word

in the fog awaits a sentence . . ."

-Agha Shahid Ali, "The Floating Post Office"

Agha Shahid Ali's prologue to A Country Without a Post Office invokes an untitled poem by Osip Mandelstam, the opening line of which reads, "'We shall meet again, in Petersburg'" (15). In choosing that opening line as the epigraph for his own prologue, Ali ensures that his entire following book of poems exists in implicit connection with Mandelstam's poem. He creates, in short, an indestructible bridge between Mandelstam's poetry and his own, and incidentally introduces the theme of his own collection: bridging. To say, "We shall meet again, in Petersburg," is as good as saying that we are parting ways, but will remain connected to one another by a common place we will both return to: it is not a complete severance because of that connection. But when Ali tries to make the same promise ("'We shall meet again, in Srinagar'" (15)) to his friend, Irfan, he says, "such a promise? I make it in Mandelstam's vel- / vet dark, in the black velvet Void" (15): one senses that the act of leaving Srinagar is wrought with finality. Srinagar is a Void, and a country without a post office: a disconnected, invisible nowhere. In what is more and more becoming my favorite poem in the collection, "The Floating Post Office," Shahid scales Kashmir down to a solitary houseboat. And by showing us that words mean the difference between existing and not existing to the people on the houseboat, he parallels at the person-to-person level what his poetry does at the person-to-nation level. By making The Country Without a Post Office (and its individual poems) an amalgam of layered bridges between the "existent" world and the "non-existent" void that is Srinagar, he brings that void into being, creating and defining it by a connectedness it has lacked as an unrecognized nation. One cannot read Ali's poems without experiencing a change in what it means to say the word, "Kashmir." And for a country whose greatest

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