Irish Poet Research Articles

СЛАВЕТНА ІРАНСЬКА ПОЕТЕСА СУЧАСНОСТІ СІМІН БЕХБАХАНІ ТА ПРОБЛЕМИ ПЕРЕКЛАДУ ПЕРСЬКОЇ ГАЗЕЛІ ІНДОЄВРОПЕЙСЬКИМИ МОВАМИ

Simin Behbahani is the most outstanding contemporary Iranian poet famous for her participation in political actions for civil freedoms such as women’s rights, against cruel forms of punishment and against Iran-Iraq war. She participated in the movement of mothers of political prisoners as well. But she became more famous in Iran for her lyrical poetry written in a traditional form of ghazal and not for her political activities. The aim of the article is to make the analyses of Simin Behbahani’s poetry and to consider the problems of its translation into different European languages. Such problems can be explained by the different ways of poetry in the eastern and western cultures: 1) the problem of keeping the metrics of ghazal; 2) the problem of keeping the sense of ghazal. Ghazal as the form originated in the Arabic literature was spread through the Near and Middle East culture and it was not known in Europe until 19th century. From the very beginning ghazal was performed against the backdrop of playing stringed musical instruments. According to the last researchers, ghazal became a base for the development of European sonnet. The authors of this article make a short review of the rhythmical features of ghazal and define its main components, such as bayt, matlaa, radif and others, that should be present at the translated text. It is important to keep these components in verse while translating because rhythmical characteristics of the ghazal are primary relatively to its sense. Scientific novelty. Simin Behbahani is known as a pioneer, who combined in her poetry genres and style of qasida and ghazal. This article deals with the translation of the ghazals by Simin Behbahani into different European languages, such as English and Romanian. Various poems by Simin Behbahani were translated by several interpreters who based their work on different reproduction principles of the original text. Metric and rhythmic of Persian verses were not kept even by the best translators into English. Farzane Milani used in her adaptation the free verse (vers libre) which had become the national form in the English poetry of the 20th century. This choise is good for translator who was born in Iran and now works at the University of Virinia. She made Persian verse understandable for native English speaker and focused at the main substance of poetry. In conclusion, Romanian translator reproduced metric and rhythmic features of the English translation but not of the Persian original. That’s why Ukrainian translators must take in account such experience and use the original text for reading.

Poetry as Eternal Voyaging: In Conversation with Theo Dorgan

This conversation with Irish poet Theo Dorgan was carried out on 9 November 2019, on occasion of his visit to Granada for the performance in this city of the music / poetry show “Loco por Lorca: An Irish Celebration of the Great Spanish Poet”. This audiovisual performance – featuring a creative exchange between music, words and poetry – had already premiered successfully in Madrid in 2018, and afterwards it was showcased in various places across Ireland, also to great critical acclaim. It was...

Medbh McGuckian and Ecofeminist Anxiety: “The Contingency of Befalling”

The present article analyses Medbh McGuckian’s “The Contingency of Befalling”, an unpublished poem dealing with present-day climate crisis from an ecofeminist stance. Arguably, the poet is part of the Northern Irish elegiac trend in dealing with issues of her country, but she departs from a male-dominated tradition and connects lament with ethical, political, national, ecological and women’s issues. This poem is related to those in her recent book Marine Cloud Brightening (2019), in which she included mournful poems for both her brother and other Irish poets who passed away in recent times, with special attention to Seamus Heaney. McGuckian’s vision of the situation of the earth and of those living in it is gloomy, and she connects it with hardship, should rulers’ policies remain unchanged.

‘Body on the Wire’: Leontia Flynn on Living through Divided Politics

Although Northern Irish poet Leontia Flynn's work has always been politically invested, her 2018 collection The Radio shifts its gaze from global pressures on the local to local lessons for global geopolitics. The poet of ‘the new North’, born and raised amidst sectarian fervour, can offer all of us a political survival strategy for bearing the weight of our deeply divided world. Despite the polarizing pull of Trump and Brexit, we must, Flynn suggests, resist the lure of extremism, and must instead cultivate a sense of lively betweenness – a position exemplified by the ‘body on the wire’ that appears in The Radio's ‘First Dialogue’. This tightrope walker is far from inert; she is rather paused, vibrating, perched energetically between two points. She therefore exemplifies the volume's broader conviction that we must be willing to hold ideas in tension and to dwell deeply with that tension – to find ways of remaining dynamic in the face of the deadening forces of dogmatism.

Anthology of Young Irish Poets, Ingrid Casey (ed.)

With great anticipation and curiosity I received the Anthology of Young Irish Poets published in 2019 by Vakhikon and edited by Irish poet and visual artist Ingrid Casey who undertook the task of harvesting representative new Irish poetic voices for the purposes of this collection. The volume reflects the need to maintain representational gender balances by showcasing modern Irish poetry as a “living art” (p. 7) with agents of this representation eleven Irish poets: Doireann Ni Ghriofa, Ingri...

Calling Cards: Ten Younger Irish Poets, Peter Fallon, Aifric Mac Aodha (eds.)

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill once described the act of writing poetry in Irish as an act akin to placing a baby in a basket and setting it downstream, in the hope that it would find some “inion Fharoinn”, “Pharaoh’s daughter” (trans. Paul Muldoon). Dual-language anthologies, and there is now a number of them, may tell us little about the state or size of the Irish-reading public but it does perhaps show that the English-reading public for poetry in Ireland, as well as English-language Irish poets, at ...

Investigación de los apéndices e indicadores relacionados con el contenido de la literatura lírica en los poemas de la santa defensa y la literatura de resistencia

La literatura lírica de Irán y sus elementos han atraído las atenciones de los poetas literarios iraníes desde hace mucho tiempo, de tal manera que se han manifestado en la mayoría de las obras de arte, incluso con temas épicos y teosóficos, así como en la literatura de resistencia y constancia. Los poemas de la defensa sagrada son las representaciones del pensamiento y el sentimiento de Irán en una época de su historia cuyos aspectos emocionales y afectivos son de gran importancia cultural. En este sentido, el presente estudio intenta investigar los indicadores de la literatura lírica en los poemas de literatura de resistencia de tres poetas prominentes en esta área, a saber, Ali Mo’allem Damghani, Qaisar Aminpour y Ali Reza Qazveh. El método de estudio de esta investigación es descriptivo-analítico y el método de recolección de datos es la investigación bibliográfica basada en el análisis de contenido. Los elementos líricos de los poemas previstos son el amor, el patriotismo, la espera, la tanatopsis y el martirio, y la atención a las emociones y sentimientos de los santos poetas de defensa en los años posteriores, entre otros. Los resultados y hallazgos del estudio significaron que los elementos de la literatura lírica presentan aspectos de eslogan y que se han manifestado notablemente en la literatura de defensa sagrada en el área de las composiciones de los poetas estudiados y también que estos tres poetas han podido exhibir muchas manifestaciones del sentimiento poético en sus poemas sobre la guerra impuesta.

Anna Liddiard’s Mount Leinster: an ecocritical reading

ABSTRACT Jane Susana Anna Liddiard was an Irish poet of the long eighteenth century whose life and work have received little scholarly attention. Her poetry, descriptive in nature, engages with a variety of subjects, including the landscape, abstract themes, and her affection for Ireland. Mount Leinster; or The Prospect: a poem, descriptive of Irish Scenery, though of disputed authorship, is perhaps Liddiard’s best work. Anonymously published in London, in the year of her death in 1819, the poem opens a panoramic view to the immediate landscape of Mount Leinster, providing a detailed account of drainage, tillage, and potato farming among other rural-agricultural practices, which unfolds into a strong criticism of British rule in Ireland. Written in the fashion of John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill,” Mount Leinster is a georgic-topographical poem that celebrates the Virgilian concept of labor improbus while criticising British imperialism and absentee landlordism for draining the land of its riches and impeding peace and justice in Ireland. This article is an attempt at shedding some light, however dim, on the figure of Anna Liddiard as an Irish poet and on her Mount Leinster as a vehicle of expression where the environment, literature, and social justice concerns meet in a poem.

President's note: The inaugural Australian Anthropological Society Behrouz Boochani Award

[Extract]: The Kurdish Iranian activist, writer and poet, and adjunct Associate Professor at UNSW, Behrouz Boochani, spent six years of his life detained without charge in Australia's offshore processing regime in Papua New Guinea. Between 2014 and 2017 he was held in the notorious and now defunct Manus Island detention centre, from where he wrote and campaigned for international recognition of the human rights abuses suffered by his fellow refugees and asylum seekers. Frustrated with the language of journalism, Boochani turned to more literary and cinematic modes of social critique and analysis, using mobile phone apps to create the award-winning book, No Friend but the Mountains and the austerely poetic film, Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, co-directed with Arash Kamali Sarvestani. These extraordinary works of art offer a kind of situated social analysis that speaks strongly, and perhaps quite particularly, to Australian anthropologists. Drawing from the intimate texture of everyday life, Boochani renders formally complex and theoretically nuanced accounts of an otherwise unknown, and indeed brutally hidden, world. These sophisticated acts of witness and analysis not only sing at the level of the sentence and video frame, they have found their way to wide and diverse audiences, breaking through the thick layers of calcified indifference and misinformation that all-too-often shapes Australian public life, so offering urgent new perspectives on our own society and the state that acts in our name.

The Shah and the beggar: on the poetic dispute between Hafiz and Shah Ni‘matullah Vali

The article comprises an analysis of the famous ghazal by the 14th cent. Iranian poet Shams al-Din Hafiz. Traditionally it has been considered as a response to a poem by his late contemporary Shah Ni‘matullah Vali. This poetic dialogue is rather remarkable since it reveals both the literary and the personal polemics. The juxtaposing of the two texts opens in their research further hermeneutic perspectives. The ideal images of the ghazals’ lyrical characters can be projected onto the personalities of the two poets and their relationships, which provides the poem by Hafiz with a new semantic dimension.The authors declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Literary Contributions by Paddy Bushe, Bernard O'Donoghue and Suso de Toro

Paddy Bushe was born in Dublin in 1948 and now lives in Waterville, Co. Kerry. He writes in Irish and in English. His collections include "Poems With Amergin" (1989), "Digging Towards The Light" (1994), "In Ainneoin na gCloch" (2001), "Hopkins on Skellig Michael" (2001) and "The Nitpicking of Cranes" (2004). "To Ring in Silence: New and Selected Poems" was published in 2008. He edited the anthology "Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael" (Dedalus, 2010). His latest collections are "My Lord Buddha of Carraig Eanna" (2012), "On A Turning Wing" (2016) and "Móinéar an Chroí" (2017). He received the 2006 Oireachtas prize for poetry, the 2006 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award and the 2017 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. He is a member of Aosdána. In 2020, Dedalus Press publishes "Double Vision", a two-volume publication comprising Second Sight, the author’s own selection of his Irish language poems, accompanied by the author’s own translations, as well as "Peripheral Vision", his latest collection in English.
 Bernard O’Donoghue’s was born in Cullen, County Cork in 1945, he has lived in Oxford since 1965. His first full-length collection, "The Weakness", emerged in 1991 with Chatto & Windus, following on from a trilogy of pamphlets. His second collection, "Gunpowder" (1995) won the Whitbread Poetry Award. More recently, he published the collection "Outliving" and a selection of his poetry by Faber in 2008, followed by "Farmers Cross" (2011), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2009 he was honoured by the Society of Authors with a Cholmondeley Award. Until recently, O’Donoghue taught and worked for Oxford University, specialising in medieval verse and contemporary Irish literature. His reputation as a scholar consolidated in 1995 with his critical work, "Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry", described as “excellent” by Ian Sansom in "The Guardian". More recently O’Donoghue edited the "Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney" and has produced a number of translations of medieval works, including "Gawain and the Green Knight" (2006) and, forthcoming from Faber, "Piers Plowman".
 Xesús Miguel "Suso" de Toro Santos (1956-) is a Spanish writer. A modern and contemporary arts graduate, he has published more than twenty novels and plays in Galician. He is a television scriptwriter and regular contributor to the press and radio. Suso de Toro writes in Galician and sometimes translates his own work into Spanish. His works have been translated into several languages, and have been taught in European universities. There are plans to make three of his works into films: "A Sombra Cazadora" (1994), "Non Volvas" (1997), and "Calzados Lola" (2000).

“A tight, mesmerizing chain of echoes”: the pantoum in Irish poetry

ABSTRACTThis article maps out the history of the pantoum form, from its origins in Austronesian culture as a pantun, to its emergence in modern Irish poetry. It is contended here that the pantoum represents the manifestation of cultural appropriation and distortion by the colonial oppressor, specifically that of the European colonisers of Austronesia. Detailed evidence for this argument is provided, drawing out the Francophone and Anglophone manipulations of the form as it developed in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. This essay proceeds to interrogate the use of the form by modern Irish poets to suggest that, while the continued use of this form risks perpetuating colonial oppression, Irish poets attentive to the history of the form foreground transnational cultural hybridity in an effort to not divest the form of its rich history and its importance in Austronesian culture. This conclusion is reached through close readings of texts by Anthony Cronin, Paul Muldoon, Nick Laird, Caitríona O’Reilly, Eleanor Hooker, and Justin Quinn.

Fitting Memorials for Seamus Heaney: Irish Poets’ Elegies and Elegiac Tributes

Fitting Memorials for Seamus Heaney: Irish Poets’ Elegies and Elegiac Tributes Joseph Heininger (bio) To say death is regrettable is only saying something about death, but to communicate that feeling is saying something about life. bernard o’donoghue In a remarkable gift of literary and cultural enrichment, many Irish poets have written elegies and elegiac poems for Seamus Heaney. His death on August 30, 2013, in Dublin was mourned throughout the world, and in response, Irish poets have written memorable elegies. Rather than adhere closely to elegy’s traditional conventions, however, Irish poets have reshaped the genre’s forms and techniques so that greater breadth, depth, and thematic reach distinguish their elegies. Among these poets are Michael Longley, Kerry Hardie, Theo Dorgan, Eamon Grennan, Paddy Bushe, Mark Roper, Bernard O’Donoghue, Sean Lysaght, and Leontia Flynn. I have selected their elegies because they offer significant perspectives on the art of contemporary Irish elegists. Each poet memorializes Seamus Heaney by remaking elegiac conventions in innovative and varied ways. Outstanding elegies have also been written by Michael Coady, John F. Deane, Katie Donovan, Thomas McCarthy, Ignatius McGovern, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, among others. Before examining some of the Irish elegies, I shall discuss the critical contexts for my inquiry. In The English Elegy, Peter Sacks points out the traditional subjects and forms for elegy: wanting to deny the fact of death; praise for the person’s attributes and virtues; pastoral or antipastoral imagery; personal lament and spoken loss; communal mourning and rituals of lamentation; and use of the pathetic fallacy.1 The contributors to The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics also state: “Traditionally, the functions of the elegy were three, to lament, praise, and console. All are responses to the experience of loss: lament, by expressing grief and deprivation; praise, by idealizing the deceased and preserving her or [End Page 105] his memory among the living; and consolation, by finding solace in meditation on natural continuances or on moral, metaphysical, and religious values.”2 Historically, after John Milton’s “Lycidas” and Alfred Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” the English elegy may or may not address whether hope or consolation can be found amidst grief and shaken faith, or lost faith. This difficulty in finding any kind of consolation or hope is also true of the contemporary Irish elegy. The traditional elegiac conventions are incorporated in many Irish elegies but with an emphasis on Irish features, genealogies, and idioms. Whether in Irish or English, Irish elegies demonstrate elegy’s importance in expressing what Eavan Boland and Mark Strand designate as a “cultural grief ” together with private grief: “In the traditional elegy, the grief the poet expresses is rarely a private one. More often, it is a cultural grief. . . . That the elegy speaks to this, that it locates the cultural customs of death in whichever society it occurs, adds greatly to its power.”3 In his influential study of Heaney’s elegies, Jahan Ramazani positions the work of several Irish poets: “While questioning, analyzing, and even attacking the elegy’s major subgenres and conventions, Heaney—together with such Irish contemporaries as John Montague, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon—energetically reclaims them for our time.”4 I endorse the idea that “the best elegies will always be sites of struggle between custom and decorum on the one hand, and private feeling on the other.” I do not agree, however, with the contention that Heaney and his contemporaries attack and subvert elegy’s conventions and subgenres; this critical position overstates the case. Peter Sacks concludes his study with a discussion of W. B. Yeats’s “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.” He places Yeats within the English tradition, yet his study also prompts the question whether Yeats’s elegy belongs instead to an Irish tradition of cultural elegy and lamentation. Yeats invokes John Synge and George Pollexfen as Irish exemplars akin to Robert Gregory, and hews to English tradition by holding up the image of Robert Gregory to his Renaissance likeness, Sir Philip Sidney: “our Sidney and our perfect man.” Yeats’s poem accommodates personal lamentation and cultural elegy, and this joint impetus shows the excellence of the modern Irish elegy...

In Back of Beyond, Redux: Tradition and History in the Poetry of Derek Mahon

In Back of Beyond, Redux: Tradition and History in the Poetry of Derek Mahon Daniel Tobin (bio) The preoccupation with history as a force that shapes the consciousness of the artist and defines the wider culture is surely nothing new in Irish poetry. Nor is it new that the shaping power of history, though indubitable, nevertheless refuses to be encompassed by the purely benign capacity Samuel Taylor Coleridge attributed to the imagination. History destroys as well as creates, as W. B. Yeats for one reminds us through the protean masks of his myth. For many in the generations of Irish poets succeeding Yeats, the ubiquitous presence of history has had to be faced without the protective armor of a visionary system—and embodied more nakedly in their works than Yeats himself envisioned when he put aside his coat of old mythologies at the onslaught of the First World War. Among these poets few have confronted the destructive nature of history as unsparingly and yet as elegantly as Derek Mahon. His metaphysical and historical skepticism as well as his existential malaise compose the unlikely temperamental groundwork for his affirmation of tradition as an alternative to transcendental systems of value. Throughout the recurrent sympathies of his work, Mahon’s labors reveal a poet who aspires to the historical sense T. S. Eliot saw in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Such a poet would write out of a historical awareness not only “the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”1 Implicitly pursuing Eliot’s ideal without embracing his politics, Mahon’s work endorses a view of cultural history as composing “a simultaneous order,” and it does so despite his poetry’s often biting irony and, at times, manifest chiliasm. At the same time, by his own estimate, the very trauma of historical, metaphysical, and geographical displacement that spurs his “rage for order” renders the artist’s work marginal if not circumspect. From this vantage, over the course of his long career Derek Mahon’s oeuvre appears forever in crisis, caught as it is between the ideal order of tradition and a potentially debilitating awareness of displacement. [End Page 68] Born in Belfast in 1941, Mahon describes his “home-turf ” as stretching “from the Cavehill Road to the Shore Road, from Carlisle Circus to Glengormley.”2 If the dominant model for an Irish poet is to locate the source of imagination in a compelling sense of place, then the suburban landscape from which Mahon hails would seem by his own account to offer limited fodder for the imagination. The often quoted opening lines of his early poem “Glengormley” declare, “Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man / Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge / And grasped the principle of the watering can.”3 Far from revealing a poet’s identification with the home turf, this wryly urbane gloss on Mahon’s first world is shaped by his characteristic irony and wit, and speaks to his reluctance to invest any particular place, even his birthplace, with the psychic security of home. Indeed, Mahon’s work might be said to be at one remove from even the Anglo-Irish strain of what Thomas Kinsella has called, famously, the dual tradition of Irish literature.4 That sense of being at a remove is especially acute in his early work, where affiliations to Irish locales often appear marginal at best. “By / Necessity, if not choice, I live here too,” reads the last line of “Glengormley.” At the same time, in another early poem, “Aran,” Mahon’s reverie of dreaming himself into the Irish language constituency of Kinsella’s dual tradition only underscores the poet’s engulfing solitude. There is a restlessness in Mahon’s work relative to the sense of place that far exceeds whatever sense of displacement may be found in the poetry of either Michael Longley or Seamus Heaney, the contemporaries with whom Mahon has been most often associated from the time of their early affiliation in the Belfast Group under the presiding figure of Philip Hobsbaum. Mahon is, as Catríona Clutterbuck observed, “preoccupied with disconnections,” and so much so that, as Hugh Haughton affirmed, “there is no purely local...

“A poem is a letter”: Stevens, Thomas McGreevy, and Susan Howe

“A poem is a letter”: Stevens, Thomas McGreevy, and Susan Howe Lee M. Jenkins WHEN PETER BRAZEAU was compiling his oral biography, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, he wrote a letter to Stevens’s friend John L. (Jack) Sweeney, telling him that “Stevens’ late poems were influenced by his contact with you, your brother, and Thomas McGreevy” (Sweeney and Sweeney). The Irish-American Sweeney brothers—John L., curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard, and James Johnson, curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—were, like the Irish poet, art critic, and director of the National Gallery of Ireland Thomas McGreevy, members of Stevens’s friend Henry Church’s cosmopolitan cultural circle. With McGreevy, the Sweeney brothers also formed what Brazeau, in his article of that title, calls Stevens’s “Irish Connection.” Stevens’s contact with the Sweeneys and McGreevy, although interpersonal on occasion, was, for the most part, epistolary. The Irish Connection was kept up via correspondence, in letters that involve a closer and more complex imbrication with Stevens’s late poems than Brazeau’s vertical line of influence may indicate. In the Irish Connection, letters and poems become constitutive of each other and are interchangeable, with poems taking the place of letters (and postcards) and letters (and postcards) of poems. Poetry and correspondence combine and recombine, reminding us that, etymologically, “Letters” is a synonym for literature. “The Irish Cliffs of Moher,” in Stevens’s last sequence, The Rock (1954), is a product of the transatlantic nexus between poetry and the post that is the stamp of the Irish Connection. In a letter to Henry Church’s widow, Barbara, of January 28, 1953, Stevens explains that Jack Sweeney “sent me a photograph of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland last summer which eventually became a poem” (L 769–70; italics added).1 “We have Tom McGreevy in common,” Stevens remarked to Jack Sweeney in a letter of April 6, 1951, and in a letter to McGreevy himself of October 24, 1952, Stevens would tell him that “Your reference to the cliffs of Moher caught my eye, since Jack Sweeney had sent me a photographic postcard of these rocks which I had placed in my room where I could see it” (L 714, 762). Sweeney’s picture postcard of the dramatic shale and sandstone rock formation on [End Page 225] the Atlantic seaboard of Co. Clare is the visual-verbal pretext for Stevens’s poem, and yet in the poem that took the place of Sweeney’s postcard, Stevens insists that “This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations / Of poetry” (CPP 427). A reverie neither on “landscape” nor on “poetry,” “The Irish Cliffs of Moher” is, rather, a meditation on what David La Guardia calls “the generative center” where “The poet’s genealogical chart . . . begins” (157): This is my father or, maybe,It is as he was, A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earthAnd sea and air. (CPP 427) In a reverse trajectory to that of Sweeney’s postcard, Stevens sends his poem-reply across the Atlantic to the west of Ireland, recasting genealogy as geology and stripping back his longstanding preoccupation with paternal and parental origins to the primal elements themselves. “As we grow old we return to our parents,” Susan Howe says in her essay on Stevens, “Vagrancy in the Park” (12). A remarkable meditation on “Late writing,” both Stevens’s and her own, Howe’s essay, like Stevens’s poem, returns to “parents”—literal and figurative, Irish and American—who, in Howe’s case, are her mother, the Dublin-born novelist and playwright Mary Manning, and Stevens himself, the “Predecessor” to whom, “As a North American poet writing in the early twenty-first century,” Howe “owe[s] . . . an incalculable debt” (Howe 26, 27, 3). In its turn, Stevens scholarship owes a considerable debt to Howe’s critical and creative remediations, given that, as Al Filreis points out, “Any consideration of what has happened to Stevens since the mid-1970s must eventually return to Howe” (“Stevens Wars” 137). Howe’s essay “Vagrancy in the Park” opens with the words “Singeth...

Frank OrmsbyThe Rain Barrel

propaganda minister; and Rudolph Hess, who landed a plane in Scotland in a futile attempt to negotiate a peace in 1941. One appreciates Larson’s attention to the morale of the English people undergoing repeated attacks in the cities. Clementine Churchill became quite concerned with conditions in the shelters, where many chose to sleep when there was a “bombers’ moon.” Finally, there is the Great Man himself, never quite stepping off his mythic pedestal, uplifting the populace with regular tours of bombed areas, speaking by radio to the nation. The reader also sees a man in his moods, as war news comes in, a man with appetites for eating, drinking, smoking, and talking till the wee hours of the morning. Reading of Churchill’s and England’s trials during 1940 and 1941, month by month, one becomes quite unsympathetic with America’s sitting out for so long. It should have been clear to F. D. Roosevelt and the American public that England suffered immensely and would not be able to withstand a full-scale invasion. Why did it take Pearl Harbor to bring the US into the war? One wants to know more about public sentiment for staying out, the resistance even toward the Lend-Lease program, Roosevelt ’s excessive caution. Had the failure of the League of Nations, the Depression, the Dust Bowl so turned our concerns inward? Did we feel secure because an ocean separated us from Europe? Can we expect another book? W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Kemal Varol Wȗf Trans. Dayla Rogers. Austin, Texas. Center for Middle Eastern Studies. 2020. 193 pages. KEMAL VAROL IS little known outside Turkey, where he is a minor star of contemporary literature. He is best known for the 2014 novel Haw, translated into English under the title Wȗf as part of the University of Texas’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies’ (CMES) book series Emerging Voices from the Middle East. In Turkey, the novel was awarded multiple prizes, including a journalism association’s peace prize, and was translated thanks to a prestigious PEN/Heim grant. The sixth book in the CMES series, Wȗf is the rare literary work from Turkey made available into English and proves its author to be as strong an emerging talent as Elif Shafak or Orhan Pamuk were upon their anglophone debuts. Books in Review Frank Ormsby The Rain Barrel Winston Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2020. 112 pages. KEEN OBSERVATIONS ARE expected of a poet, and Irish poet Frank Ormsby satisfies many times over in The Rain Barrel. The book is filled with bright idylls such as “The Beekeeper” and “Small Things.” In “Small Things,” a pair of “old boys” try to cheer the speaker because he’s just missed seeing a heron: “They cast about for fitting consolation. / ‘Have you seen the egrets?’” they ask. But the speaker’s not disappointed: he finds “three pleasures” in their joy from “the small things made precious by their delight.” Each of these poems is a pretty figure in its own right, like pieces of beach glass, but The Rain Barrel is much more than a string of pretty baubles. There are poems of playful personification, such as “Scarecrow,” in which Ormsby imagines the family’s scarecrow pining for a “ragdoll / who won a prize for lady of the house” and who “lives in a cornfield further west.” As these character/objects multiply and reoccur throughout The Rain Barrel, they begin to weave a complex tapestry of a place and a family. Ormsby demonstrates a subtle virtuosity in this book. There are many variations and departures from the quiet, reflective poems. The poem “Small World (4)” is a series of ten brief and independent stanzas. Each of them is a highly compressed combination of observation and sentiment. If one isn’t fussy about counting syllables, they are excellent examples of the haiku form. Or, for a different form, consider “The Love Poem,” which begins by announcing “the love poem has been discredited / . . . a day has been set aside for the shredding of the English love sonnet.” However, by the end of the piece, the love poem has been restored—“my prohibition...

“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”: Reading Trauma in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry

“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”: Reading Trauma in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry Carla Anderson (bio) The Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson was born and raised in 1950s Belfast in an Irish Catholic family living on the Falls Road, which is the heart of West Belfast and an Irish Catholic community within the city. While talking about his childhood in an interview, Carson refers to himself as “a guy from the Falls Road” before even mentioning Catholicism, indicating the importance of the Falls as a geographical locator that is coded with deeper meanings of identity.1 In his poetry, too, place frequently acts as a stand-in for identity. Although both Carson’s poetry and his prose often reflects his personal experiences and history, it is also fictionalized. Even The Star Factory, a book-length essay exploration of the deep history of Belfast that includes details from his own life, is not meant to be a memoir, as he explains in the same interview: “You never really know how things were exactly. We reinvent it all the time.”2 In his poetry, Carson deconstructs and recombines bits of history, news stories, and personal experiences to create a space in which the traumatic experiences of the Troubles can be processed and expressed through his writing. Similarly, places in his poems constantly shift and change, complicating the easy security that comes out of knowing where one is from. His poetic forms often feature nonlinear narratives and stylistic structures that echo the complexities of how trauma is experienced, and thematically, his poems emphasize the generative potential of constant change, even as it can be disorienting. Rather than remaining trapped in a cycle of traumatic thoughts, the speakers in Carson’s poems make use of this generative change to regain some creative autonomy. The Troubles, thirty years of intense sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the late 1990s, caused over 3,900 deaths and has had a deep and lasting impact on Northern Irish society. One psychology study from 2013 found that the highest type of traumatic experience reported by adults in Northern Ireland was what the researchers called “network events,” a term that encompasses witnessing traumatic events that affect a “loved one” or witnessing [End Page 125] serious injury, death, or a dead body.3 This study, along with others, emphasizes the severity of post-traumatic response to secondhand traumas as well as firsthand experiences—for example, witnessing a serious injury could be traumatic just as much as personally experiencing that same injury. In this way, even citizens who did not directly experience a personal trauma were still traumatized by the Troubles. Nor did the official end of the conflict bring peace or closure: journalist Lyra McKee further points out just how deeply the trauma has influenced the society even long after the conflict had passed by noting that since the cease-fire in 1999, the suicide rate in Northern Ireland has nearly doubled and, as of 2016, exceeds the number of deaths attributed to the Troubles.4 Given the extent of the impact of the Troubles, trauma often dominates the conversation about contemporary Northern Irish history. As scholar Jim Smyth notes in his introduction to a collection of essays about the Troubles, the rhetoric surrounding this period fixates on Ireland’s long history of colonial oppression, rebellion, and violence to amplify a prevailing notion that the Irish are stuck in a permanent divide and unable to escape from a cycle of sectarian violence.5 In this cultural context, it is even more vital to discuss poetry that pushes back against a narrative of being “stuck.” In Ciaran Carson’s work, memory is unreliable, which allows the speakers in his poems to evade a relationship to history that is fixed and inescapable. References to the Troubles appear throughout the body of Carson’s work, particularly his poetry, prose, and memoir writings. This prevalence suggests that events from this time are deeply influential to Carson, who returns to similar themes from his earliest works up through his final collection of poetry. Significantly, despite reconsidering familiar themes, his work emphasizes change and evolution—both in his writing styles and in how...

Azita GhahremanNegative of a Group Photograph by Maura Dooley Elhum Shakerifar

This is a thought-provoking novel. Sometimes it’s like an academic work with explanatory footnotes, and readers can find critical comments in Brother Yingwu’s noisy mind. Li Er carefully knits contemporary Chinese scholars’ collective memory and their personal experiences into this novel, and he tactfully finds an echo in their hearts. Gong Qiangwei (宫蔷薇) China University of Mining and Technology Azita Ghahreman Negative of a Group Photograph Trans. Maura Dooley with Elhum Shakerifar. Eastburn, U K. Bloodaxe Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2018. 119 pages. NEGATIVE OF A GROUP PHOTOGRAPH includes thirty Persian poems by Azita Ghahreman with parallel English translations by Maura Dooley in collaboration with Elhum Shakerifar. The collection offers a fine view of Ghahreman’s introspective and sometimes inventive poetry, but its back cover makes a puzzling claim that Ghahreman is “the leading Iranian poet.” It’s unclear what the poet might be imagined to lead, but Ghahreman has not, to the best of this reviewer’s knowledge, led poetry in terms of sales, popular reception, or critical acclaim in Iran or elsewhere. That obvious misnomer sets an unfortunate tone for the book. The poet could well have been commended for publishing five collections previously, for garnering institutional support in Sweden, her country of exile, and for finding a capable English translator in Dooley, all without recourse to hyperbolic marketing. But perhaps more to the point, the exaggerated claim seems to assume that English readers are and will remain ignorant of how Persian poetry is alive and well, with a diverse community of poets who continually produce exciting new work in countries like Iran and Afghanistan and their diasporas. Nonetheless, Ghahreman’s poetry takes a more balanced self-view. Her poetic voice often joins in conversation with her peers, as in the collection’s titular poem, which is dedicated to the “memory of the poets Ghazaleh Alizadeh and Nazanin Nezam Shahi” and recalls how their lives and the speaker’s converged for a time: “I am younger in this photograph, / younger than anything I’ve ever written, / and I am the third missing person.” Ghahreman’s poems can also be commended for lending themselves well to translation. For one, while poets who experiment with classical forms pose an array of aesthetic challenges to the translator —see, for example, Dick Davis’s wonderfully erudite translations of Fatemeh Shams—Ghahreman writes primarily in free verse, allowing a translator like Dooley to more or less replicate the same structure on the opposite side of the page without having to accommodate for rhyme or metrical constraints. Thematically, too, Ghahreman’s world extends beyond national borders, her memories inhabited with “photos of Oppenheimer, Lumumba ” in a poem like “Glaucoma.” In fact, one hears reverberations of world poetry throughout the collection. Neruda’s “Explico algunas cosas” echoes in Ghahreman’s “Negative of a Group Photograph” when the poetic voice addresses the aforementioned Alizadeh and Shahi: “For you must remember Ghazaleh? . . . For you must remember Nazanin?” Likewise, Ghahreman ’s “Red Bicycle,” especially in Dooley’s translation, recalls William Carlos Williams ’s wheelbarrow upon which so much depends: “I still dream / of my red bicycle / on the green shores of summer.” Dooley’s translations, however, do not always seize upon the best opportunities to capture the poems’ universal dimensions. One such missed opportunity appears every time Dooley fails to translate the word “fārsi” from the original language: “lovingly, I wrote the snow in Farsi”; “until Farsi finds the courage to speak with the heart of a whale.” Of course, many of us use the word “Farsi” in everyday speech to refer to the language spoken by contemporary Iranians. But a poetry translation should aspire toward a more literary and historically accurate use of English. In Ghahreman ’s language, fārsi denotes the language of her own poetry and her mother tongue. It denotes the same language in which Omar Khayyam wrote the Rubaiyat made famous in English by Edward Fitzgerald just as it does the language in which Rumi composed his masterpieces beloved by so many world literature enthusiasts today. The English name of Khayyam’s and Rumi’s and therefore Ghahreman’s language is Persian. It is a language that has been named...

I Do Not Believe

Elyas Alavi is a poet and visual artist based in Adelaide. Born in the Daykundi province of Afghanistan, he has published three poetry books: I Am a Daydreamer Wolf, published in 2008 in Tehran (5th ed., 2016), followed by Some Wounds (Kabul, 2012) and Hodood (Tehran, 2015). Fatemeh Shams’s third collection, When They Broke Down the Door, translated by Dick Davis, received the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award. She won the Jaleh Esfahani poetry prize for the best young Iranian poet in 2012. Leonard Schwartz’s recent books include The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press) and Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House). I Do Not Believe by Elyas Alavi My beloved if Death be here for you Let it be in tuberculosis’ form Or the form of bitter cold, Not as prey of suicide bombing. You should have the time To review your memories, To review the particulars of your body, To make plans for your departure. Not to depart the house on your feet And we only find your shoes in the bazaar. Not to ever find your hands or your smile. Never to locate your eyes. With my own eyes I ought to Witness your death, your final breath. My fingers should touch your eyelids to close. Otherwise, no one will believe it, forever I myself will not believe it. Translation from the Persian By Fatemeh Shams & Leonard Schwartz Visit worldlit.org to read Alavi’s poem “Brother Khosrow” and hear the author read the Persian originals. POETRY WORLDLIT.ORG 13 ILLUSTRATION BY ELYAS ALAVI FROM THE SERIES WAKING DREAMS ...

СПЕЦИФІКА РЕВОЛЮЦІЙНОЇ ПОЕЗІЇ ХАСАНА ХОСЕЙНІ

The author of this overview article examines the specificity of themes in the revolutionary poetry of Iranian poet Hasan Hoseini (1956–2004) – a representative of the younger generation of poets in 80s of the twentieth century in Iran. The relevance of the chosen topic is due to the insufficient number of Ukrainian-language studies devoted to the poetry of certain figures of Iranian poets of that period and their idostyle, particularly Hasan Hoseini's poetry. His personality as one of the bright creators of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Persian poetry of the late twentieth century in Iran was discovered thanks to revealing the specifics of the thematic content and artistic images of his poetry, which differed in social, patriotic and religious directions. It was revealed that Hassan Hoseini's poetry is filled with the propagation of Shiite religious views, reflections on national justice, responsibility for the fate of the fatherland, and social stratification of people. In his poems, the poet sharply criticizes the negative qualities of man, exalts the leaders of the Islamic Revolution, expresses hope for a better future for the Iranian people, etc. The study of poetry from his collections "Consonant with Ishmael" and "Sparrow and Gabriel" made it possible to identify the main features of the Hasan Hoseini's works such as: the variety of genre forms, among which Masnavi with innovative views and rhymes occupies a special place; new storylines; the prevalence of poetry of sociopolitical nature with religious orientation; transferring images of she'r-e now into the "new ghazal"; an inner melody of words; a large number of artistic means; new complex images and metaphors; the fullness of Iran's rich and high Islamic culture. Having achieved the goal, which was to analyze Iranian Persian-language poetic works of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods of the twentieth century and the presentation of their authors to Ukrainian researchers and orientalists, it was possible to defend the value of the Iranian literary heritage of the outlined period with its new facets of Persian literature, its own artistic, aesthetic, ideological and thematic features.