An eternal stage
Several of these poems are extracts from a longer epic sequence, ‘Nassim’s Testament’, but the theme of exile is apparent immediately:
We said, ‘We don’t, we don’t want to die.’
They said, ‘Then if you don’t
Allah’s earth is spacious enough.’
Less than two nights later we sold our house
and bought shoes and caps thick enough
to kill the cold and biting winds of Dunkirk and Bruges.
[‘The Bright Salt’]
The reader may anticipate a horrific small boat experience, the sort of thing the media has so vividly reported, but Davar touches lightly on the journey itself, which almost erases the travellers (‘we were ghosts / who fled at midnight in a shipping container’). The poems from the sequence go on to tell a bigger story through surprising frames: huge metaphors, images of gods and heroes. There are references to Seraphim and Cherubim; Golgotha, Shiraz, Liverpool and London; even Rembrandt and Lorca. Imagination is enormous and the myths of exile are timeless. It feels biblical.
The author has real-life experience as an asylum seeker (his native country is Iran) and uses his own name for one of the central characters in the ‘Nassim’s Testament’ poems. The other protagonist (Nassim) takes his name from a real-life friend of the poet’s, someone who did not escape. Or perhaps he did in another sense (he took his own life). But from the rolling biblical style, it is clear that both characters are voices on a symbolic stage, an epic and eternal theatre.
The publisher’s website links to a video of the poet talking about his work. It’s helpful in beginning to understand his unusual approach, and also gives insight into his habit of thinking like a painter, and writing in direct response to paintings. He’s an illustrator as well as a poet, and the beautiful part-man-part-fish image on the jacket is his.
The ‘Testament’ poems are big, in scope and content. They made me want to read the whole set from which they are drawn.
However, in this unusual pamphlet, it was one of the short poems, ‘Pastoral 1’, that struck me as most moving. Happily it is also on the publisher’s website and can be read it there in full. For me, it poignantly brings together myth and reality, rhetoric and plain speech. In this way, it delivers an eternal freight from and to the heart.