The Persian poets most often read by English speakers are either well-known names—Rumi, Hafez, or, from the twentieth century, Forugh Farrokhzad—or post-Revolutionary, contemporary émigrés writing in English. That relatively narrow scope makes it especially valuable to experience the work of a modern Iranian poet who still lives in the country and writes in his native language. Born in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and in the same year that the Iran-Iraq War began, Abdolmalekian possesses a profound grasp of how major societal ruptures affect the psyche of an entire generation. His work describes the crushing weight of unremitting conflict—whether from external forces or within one’s own country—and also contemplates how memory keeps loved ones alive even as it can prevent wounds from healing. In “I Need to Acknowledge,” for instance, he calculates both the physical and emotional toll of such losses through the lens of those who bear the heaviest burdens:
the curved posture of my father
who after years
has yet to take my brother’s corpse
off his shoulders
and place him in the ground
Although grief is individual, in these poems we are all related, left to the mercy of our recollections and subject to a pain and regret nearly impossible to dislodge. Yet without such memories—particularly those that we most wish to erase—we are lost, as Abdolmalekian laments in “Door Hinge”:
My brother!
How can I find you
when I don’t remember
how I lost you?
Can there ever be healing from the repetitive trauma that seeps into the ground and becomes entwined in the DNA of the children born during this kind of destruction? Abdolmalekian’s poetry reflects how the radioactivity of murderous conflict can be detected long after the battles have been lost. His allegories, as in the unforgettable “The Bird of Sorrow,” often encapsulate these indelible effects. In this poem, a dying bird considers who will ultimately feed on him and the consequences of his killing:
The hunter doesn’t know
I’ll be flying in their stomachs for years
and his children
will turn slowly
into cages
Even in translation, there’s an essential Persianness in these works as Abdolmalekian deftly weaves together philosophical questions, memorable allegories, and immensely lyrical images with emotional honesty and depth. Yet his poetry is also entirely modern in structure and content, which is a credit to the translators, as well as to the strength and beauty of his natural tone and voice. Abdolmalekian is a poet of our interconnected, transnational time—this era of citizen against government, of surveillance and mistrust, of loss, despair, and yet somehow, always: of hope and love.
In line with the long-term financial hardships experienced by so many Iranians, there is an attendant economy of language here that is all the richer for its distillation. Words on the page are as distinct as the best basmati rice, which in the perfect chelo are long, distinct, and, when perfectly cooked by the experienced hand, offer a firmness to the bite. This sparseness of style reflects the constriction and restriction of this generation’s public life: Abdolmalekian makes every word count, leaving significant white space on the page as an opening to possibility, to all that is unspoken. As life gets smaller, single words matter more; as the vision narrows, the frame contracts. Ultimately, all that remains are one’s thoughts, which are only available to the self, increasing feelings of isolation. Yet, through Abdolmalekian’s verse, there’s a soulful echo that ties us to each other, a connection without which we could all be lost, as in “Acquiescence”:
And life grew so narrow
that we fell
finally
into the same pit
we leapt over
many times
before.
Interspersed with stand-alone poems are a number of poetic “snapshots,” short numbered poems with “Pattern” or “Long Exposure” in the title. They are as visual as they are linguistic, reminiscent of related photographs hung together on the wall of a gallery, or perhaps a cross between zen koans and Sufi lessons, all while remaining unmistakably Abdolmalekian. Building upon each other like musical refrains, they inspire emotion beyond the specifics of meaning, as in the unpunctuated “Pattern VII”:
Under the overcast sky
the sunflower
thinks about the sense of its name
Despite invocations of conflict and its lingering aftermath, these are not desolate poems. The darkness in the lives of these speakers makes the light of hope seem especially bright, even if it’s only a sliver of moon coming through the grated windows of a cell. Although quintessentially Iranian in subject and tone, the collection will resonate with many around the world overwhelmed by division in their lives as it underscores the universal nature of sorrow and loneliness and the necessity of hope. In “Bricks,” Abdolmalekian unforgettably captures both:
The water has risen to my neck
The bricks have risen to my neck
The water passing my lips now
The water rising and rising . . .
But I will not die
I will become a fish.
In a country at war with others and with itself, are all its inhabitants soldiers, with invisible scars that ache and remain through all the seasons of their lives? The material realities—the unending lacks—along with the ongoing government surveillance attack the heartbeat of a culture’s soul. And what becomes of a society in which people disappear? One imagines a life that is more question than answer, more waiting than arrival, more precarious than stable, a space from which forward motion can feel impossible. As the speaker of “Infrared Camera” expresses:
The train terrifies me
when it departs
and splits this many people
from that many.
Perhaps the worst loss is that of the self, the one that arises when the individual comes into conflict with his own fractured mind, as presented in “Ant”:
In my dreams
these days contain an image
that scares me
an image of a rope hung from the ceiling
a man hanged by the rope
with his back to me
and only I know, I
who am terrified to turn him around.
Forever marked by the post-traumatic stress of living amid unsettled, uncontrollable times, one can survive and even persevere, but at what cost? What does so much suspicion and surveillance do to a person and a culture? In “On Power Lines,” as in several other poems, the poet writes of a barely hidden anguish using elements of the natural world, expressed as both enduring and vulnerable:
We have driven the bees
to make honey from poisonous flowers
And the sparrow that perched for years on the power lines fears the branches of the trees.
Tell me how to manage my smile
when they have planted land mines all around my lips.
In “Long Exposure V,” another bee stands in for all those who attempt to rise again after longstanding conflict. Abdolmalekian neatly addresses both perseverance and the hidden dangers of the world dealt to us. He exhorts readers to “forget” and embrace living, despite the underlying threat that one’s sense of normality may be shattered in an instant:
Forget about the machine gun
about death
and consider the saga of a bee
humming over minefields
in pursuit of a flower.
The concept of saarnevesht—literally “what is written on one’s head,” one’s fate—imbues Persian culture and these poems. Can an individual or a society escape its destiny? Can we prevent history from repeating itself? Or are we preordained to continue in the grooves marked out before us? In “Game,” a father’s memories offer a tragic conflation of emotions around a common object in a situation that is no game at all:
You change the game
and hang yourself from the rope
you swung on
years ago.
We are the repetitions
of the pieces
of each other
like you, my son, on this swing
as I who swing you
to forget the rope.
The visual nature of the translations underscores both the challenge and wonder of human connection. The English running from left to right moves toward the Persian running from right to left, almost forming an unwritten meeting place in the literal spine of the book. Even without a full understanding of either language, the structure of these marks on the pages reflects our desires to connect, to understand, despite a chasm of space between us.
There’s a dreaminess to these poems, a plane in which the living are dead and the dead are living, with the demarcation between the two almost too slight to behold. Many of the poems consider rebirth and transformation, allowing us to envision another vista or imagine another life. Yet we are reminded that radical change isn’t pretty or gentle but often a brutal dismantling or a sacrifice. Sometimes death, in the form of metamorphosis, offers escape, even if it requires undoing all of an entity’s identifiable elements, as in “Pattern VI”:
Flying
was no longer the bird’s wish
It plucked its feathers out
one by one,
in order to lie bald upon this pillow,
in order to slip into a different dream
What is left when we have plucked out all our flight, when our essential nature has been irretrievably altered? As much as we might try to alter the repetitions of life, including those that send us into the fire, break our hearts, that shatter the soul, the characters in these poems are often driven to repeat themselves in the hope that this time it might change the narrative into which they were born.
The collection also explores the physical and emotional effects of isolation. In this time of social distancing, verses like the following from “Injured Poem on the Table” are even more poignant:
Seclusion
is a wound larger than the body
and this door
even if it opens onto hell
will bring me joy
Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey, the talented translators who have brought Abdolmalekian’s work to English speakers, note in their introduction how these poems are frequently fabulist and cinematic. Reading this collection often feels like a moment suspended between wakefulness and sleep, where the real retreats enough to encourage all possibilities, as in “Acquiescence”:
So was that all life could be?
An index finger pointing toward the faraway?
Snow falling for years
yet failing to take shape into piles?
There is a rich interiority in these works that stands in sharp contrast to an ever-present sense of surveillance. Most of the poems have a strong narrative “I” but easily speak for millions far beyond Iranian borders. The poet himself aims for this transcendence of language and culture: “In me there are characters / who write their own poetry with my hands.”
In “Bits of Darkness,” Abdolmalekian explores the Iranian concept of divaane which roughly translates to “insane,” but here he offers a slant meaning of one who still hopes and who refuses to give in to darkness or desolation:
He must be insane
this man tied by a rope to the sunrise.
He is insane
this man who was shot yesterday
who still plans his escape.
Especially now, Garous Abdolmalekian is a necessary voice in the world poetry canon. Encompassing significant events that are both current and historical, his poems—which feel prescient given when they were written—also operate at a cellular level. They are about individuals as much as humanity overall, about the lovers lost to each other as much as they are about cultures (nearly) lost to oppressive societies. In “One-Way Ticket,” he wonders:
How many times are we born
that we die
so many times?
. . .
Oh, all the one-way tickets!
I haven’t found anything
more sorrowful than you
in the pockets of the world.
Abdolmalekian is using his one-way ticket to reveal and repair our collective human condition, to serve as witness and eloquent verse-maker, and to speak for and to us, wherever we may be and whatever language we might speak. May there be more of his words to mark his journey and ours.
