The Shorter Poems 1993-2023
Alamgir Hashmi is a significant voice in English poetry, one that straddles with aplomb both Eastern and Western poetic conventions and affirms these traditions with his astonishing achievement.
He spent his earlier years in Pakistan before living in exile in Europe and North America.
In a career spanning eleven previous collections, Hashmi’s work has been widely recognized. His many honours and distinctions include a Rockefeller Fellowship and the Roberto Celli Memorial Award. About fifteen years ago he was made a Life Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Letters.
The Shorter Poems 1993 –2023 gathers together some of the best of Hashmi’s lyric poetry, providing a compelling collection by this major poet whose new work often dazzles, delights, and challenges the reader.
‘Alamgir Hashmi's poems are a delight—sinuous and assured, serious with a light touch, full of character, surprise, authenticity. I read them with intense pleasure.’ Ted Hughes
‘Hashmi's poems work delicacy kept in place and tension by an underlying sense of patience. The wit and the short lines he frequently uses, with a light-footed pace, strengthen these qualities.’ Jon Silkin
‘World traveller and wry postmodernist, Hashmi is an emblematic poet of the late twentieth century, an uneasy lover stranded in an ‘off-moonlight’, a sceptic who can still taste the possibility of ‘perhaps’. There is a persistent lyric resource in these poems that redeems the times. They are clear-eyed and compassionate, unflinching in their celebration of the ‘ephemeral verities’.’ Roger Garfitt
‘The poems I sense hold just the right degree of irony and outrage and love of creation. The best of so many necessary traditions and emotions. . . . Thank you again for this fierce and tender beauty.’ F. Daniel Berrigan, S.J.
‘Alamgir Hashmi is a poet of originality, one whose work confronts a variety of themes in a distinctive, energetic manner …’ John Greening
ISBN: 978-1-910996-77-5
No of Pages: 170 pp