Section 1

It should be noted that "The Country Without a Post Office" is very complex and allusive and is not "representative" of the empirical world in any direct way. A commonly held tenet of New Critical theory is that poems should not be summarized or paraphrased, because doing so distorts the meaning of the poem. Attempts to summarize Ali's poem, then, or any poem worth its salt, inevitably are guilty of what New Critics called the heresy of the paraphrase.

The epigraph of Ali's poem is from one of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Terrible Sonnets," which begins, "I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day." Ali's poem echoes many of the themes and images in Hopkins's. In the first section of "The Country Without a Post Office," the narrator returns to a country (Kashmir) where a "minaret has been entombed." A minaret is a tower, used...