It was with a happy sadness this week that I began to browse the new Poetry Review. Happy, because, under Emily Berry’s editorship, the contents have always been an excellent mix of poems and criticism. Sad, because it is her final issue.
Emily began editing Poetry Review in 2017, the same year that she completed a Creative-Critical PhD at the University of East Anglia. I supervised her critical research, on ‘elegy’s ghost’ in contemporary poetry; the creative work, supervised by Denise Riley, became her wonderful second collection, Stranger, Baby (Faber, 2017).
When I heard Emily had been offered the Poetry Review job, I knew I would want to read every issue — but I also looked at the molehills of old magazines around my office, and decided to sign up for the digital version from Exact Editions. I’m still a paper addict, but the touchscreen Poetry Review has been a real pleasure to read. Clean, simple, visually smooth, and easy to look through back issues.
I’m grateful, too, to Emily for publishing an article I wrote following the death of the Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim. It appeared in the Autumn 2019 issue. Here is an extract:
Fawzi Karim, who died in May, knew what it was to be a ghost. Born in Baghdad in 1945, he came to England in 1978 and settled in Greenford, West London. He married and had children, and established himself as a critical authority on Western classical music. But in his imagination, London life always seems to have been an afterlife. In Arabic, Karim was prolific, publishing many books of poetry and criticism, as well as years of newspaper columns, and his own quarterly, al-lahdha al-Shi’iria (Poetic Moment). For Anglophone readers, he exists in two late collections: Plague Lands and other poems (2011) and Incomprehensible Lesson (2019), both translated by Anthony Howell and published by Carcanet. Together, they form a testament of a life in which, as he said, “[Death] became real, maybe deeper than reality itself.”
[…]
Karim’s dream-like and tragic long poem, ‘Plague Lands’, tells the same story in episodic fragments. It begins by mingling his riverside childhood with the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, as recorded on clay tablets from the second millennium BC. “The Tigris will nudge us with its epics / And, with its wand, expose the deceit / of burdened skies that weep for the days on end”. The pathetic fallacy of lachrymose skies may seem unremarkable to the reader of English poetry. But this is precisely why it is striking here, as Karim explains in the short essay that forms the introduction to Incomprehensible Lesson. The great modernist Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was, he notes, criticised for the line “Do you know what sort of grief the rain sends?”, written under the influence of Edith Sitwell’s gothic poem of the London Blitz, ‘Still Falls the Rain’ (1940) (“Still falls the Rain – / Dark as the world of man, black as our loss – / Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails / Upon the Cross”.) “[The critics] regretted this”, Karim observes sardonically, “because the rain in our climate is a testament to goodness. How then can it arouse grief to the heart of the poet!” The problem, he reflects, is that
Our critics invariably approach the poem via theory. They do not realise that the feelings of the poet here come from a source which is a mystery. I can have such feelings towards the rain (perhaps because I live in Greenford!) – and towards the sadness of its falling which also has a natural and divine beauty… I call it the metaphysical dimension of poetry.
This paragraph gets to the heart of Karim’s quiet contrariness. The origin of a poet’s feelings, he asserts, are a mystery, not determined by external considerations such as climate and culture. Yet in the next breath, he allows for the possibility that his own sadness towards the rain may well be a form of learned melancholy, an English ailment.