Faiz, A Wailing Nightingale

Faiz, born one hundred years ago in Sialkot, one of Pakistan’s cradles of poetry, mastered classical traditions of preceding generations of poets through exhaustive study of works in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and English. He was not content to limit himself to aesthetics and form, and over the course of his life went on to frame a dynamic and engaged form of poetry that resonates far beyond Pakistan.``
The poems in Faiz, a Wailing Nightingale: Urdu Poems establish Faiz as a great lyricist who embraced traditional motifs and subjects with an unrivaled passion and proclivity for verse that explores the natural and illusory qualities of love. Yet, as the title of the collection asserts, Faiz was a wailing nightingale—a tortured man who loved beauty, but found himself surrounded by the pain, sorrow, poverty, bloodshed, and tears of daily life in post-Colonial Pakistan. It is in this dynamic counterpoise that Faiz’s artistry becomes manifest, mixing the good, the bad and the ugly in a delightful manner.
What revolutionizes his poetry is an engaged awareness of the social and political manipulation that pervades modern life, championing action and change without losing perspective that greed, tyranny, and oppression are constant foes that imperil our ability to contain or hold onto transcendent beauty. And so, he wailed and wailed until he died, leaving for his fortunate readers a treasury of poems that will stir their passion, soothe their spirit, and fulfill their heart. This elegiac and elegant collection offers both Faiz devotees and newcomers a treasured new collection from this important, transcendent poet.