Plague Lands and Other Poems
Fawzi Karim
Carcanet, 2011
892.71 K18p
excerpt:
The Cliff (from poems about the Tigris)
The waves wash back from the bank,
And there's my father's shadow in his skiff,
And there's a vein like the veins of a hand
Fossilised in the familiar cliff.
There's green pottery, seals, and a mud tablet,
Villages blurred by their moss,
And a muted voice in the conches
Booming about the hoof-beats of the unknown.
Echoes vibrate in a shell...
And the waves swing back to wash against the bank.
"Fawzi Karim is one of the most compelling voices of the exiled generation of Iraqi writers. The first of his poetry to appear in English, this collection includes an elegy for the life of a lost city—a chronicle of a journey into exile, haunted by the deep history of an ancient civilization. Memories of Baghdad’s alleys, smoke-filled cafés, and mulberry-shaded squares are recalled with painful intensity." -publisher
Fawzi Karim is an exiled Iraqi poet born in 1945, living in London.