
Exile Returned
Arriving in the United States from India in 1975, Kashmiri author Agha Shahid Ali pursued both graduate degrees and his art. While quickly successful in the world of writing programs and academic presses, he explored in his poetry how readily expatriation could come to feel like exile. But as his collected poems, The Veiled Suite, make clear, he worked hard to find in such exile if not his true home, at least a safe house, as in book after book until his untimely death in 2001 he measured the distance between East and West.
Admittedly, this distance has been closing for a while. From the