Bahr is Arabic for “sea” but means “meter” when applied to poetry. Zeina Hashem Beck weaves poems of deep longing that feel like whole worlds. This ghazal, a traditional Middle Eastern/Persian/Indian ...

Frances W. Pritchett, a well-known critic of Urdu and professor at Columbia University, writes: “To me ghazal’s reliance on its wonderful networks of images and conventions makes it very clear that ...

Using repetition to splice two genres – the oriental ghazal and the blues – this humorous offering demonstrates the poet's joy in language and form There's always a wealth of interesting new writing ...

I first encountered Ghalib in the early 1970s. I was in graduate school, studying poetry. Then, as now, I had no Urdu. The medium of transmission—translation—was Aijaz Ahmad’s Ghazals of Ghalib, from ...

A session on 'Urdu Ghazal New Formations' was held at the 14th International Urdu Conference at the Arts Council of Pakistan Karachi, which was moderated by Nasira Zuberi. On this occasion, Ambreen ...

Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s Baker of Tarifa based on the history of interfaith tolerance in Al-Andalus won the 2011 San Diego Book Award for poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize ...

With the passing of Dr Bashir Badr at 91, Indian literature loses one of the last towering figures of the modern Urdu ghazal ...

Canonised as one of Urdu’s greatest poets, Mir Muhammad Taqi “Mir” of Delhi, who died in 1810, also authored a collection of verse in Persian. He composed verse in genres other than the ghazal, in ...

An apparently very personal statement about how to live extends into much wider politics Ghazal: Myself by Marilyn Hacker They say the rules are: be forgotten, or proclaim myself. I’m reasonably tired ...

Shad Naved’s The Ghazal Eros: Lyric Queerness in History is a long-awaited study. This book has been anticipated not only as an important scholarly intervention but also as a distillation of Naved’s ...