and this in my view is not a small undertaking for I have noticed many greater poets become pathetic failures in this regard N M Rashed one of the greatest writers of nazm of this century seems hopelessly ineffective in his ghazals which mercifully are few in number The couplets of his ghazals are lyrical no doubt but nonetheless without the compression the tightness and the finality of expression which characterize a good ghazal couplet Shaheen has a personal style and a distinctive voice of his own in his ghazats On the surface he would seem to belong with the exponents of the ' New Ghazal " with poets like Ahmad Mushtaq but some of his imagery—television channels dialled wrong numbers ambulances etc imagery derived from a contact with North American life—places him a step ahead of the "New Ghazal generation His subjects in ghazal are not the traditional subjects of the ghazal—love beloved separation from the beloved actually one has to look very hard to find a female figure in his ghazals His ghazals deal with issues like the problem of personal identity the fear of disintegration the loss of the sell etc the issues that concern him in his nazm as well The sensibility which emerges from his ghazals is modern and contemporary Going through his nazms one quickly notices his awareness of his immediate surroundings He is a poet who has a definite sense of place The very first poem in Be-Ni^an ("Sign-less") is about the city of Ottawa although the poem is tilled Qirya-e JaN KF Nazm ( A Poem About the City of Being") There are other references to specific places in Canada like for instance the Yukon and Mirabel Airport in Montreal but the season identified in his poetry is always winter which makes perfect sense for it is the cruel and harsh Canadian winter which makes more of an impact on human imagination than any other season But it is not just Canada which Shaheen uses as a locale for his poems There are poems about almost every place Shaheen has lived in or visited physically or even imaginatively There are several poems about Bangladesh one poem which is titled "Vietnam " one which refers to Berlin to the Middle East and Cyprus one which is about Palestine There are many poems about Pakistan One of the poems does not mention any particular city in Pakistan but deals with the idea of re-naming the city streets after the names of the ' sanctified dead heroes of the war All these references make it obvious that Shaheen is the kind of poet who is not only observant of his surroundings but is also able to receive impact from it He is capable of making the place outside the place within and of recreating it as the setting for one or the other of his poems His poetry offers in other words a continuous testimony to his own life-odyssey The other thing one notices about him is that he is a writer of vignettes or impres sions Many of his poems are short concentrated and intense visual pictures of people or happenings He has a remarkable talent for developing unexpected apt metaphors More often than not his poems are just those metaphors explored to their limits Such poems end with a sudden revelation or some new knowledge which is essentially based upon an understanding of those metaphors TadbJr Rafu / Annual oi Urdu Studies #5 128