Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) is among the handful of post-Independence Indian poets to have gained international recognition as a writer of great originality and technical accomplishment. This volume comprises his final two verse collections, Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals and Rooms Are Never Finished: Poems. In Call Me Ishmael Tonight the poet offers a new form—the American ghazal—written as salutations to his eminent poet contemporaries in the USA. In these he also courageously faces the fact of his own mortality. In Rooms Are Never Finished the poet follows the trail of his previous collection titled The Country Without a Post Office in order to excavate the devastation wrought upon Kashmir, his childhood home—the place about which he felt most deeply.He links a more personal devastation to the destiny of his homeland: his mother’s death and the journey with her body back to Kashmir. These are poems of amazing inventiveness, infused with passion and grief. This is a collection which conclusively reinforces the view that Agha Shahid Ali possesses a voice of the rarest distinction.