Well hello, readers and writers! How are you fine people? I hereby share with you my latest book reviews. These include two poetry collections and two memoirs, one of which is also a writing manual. Each gave me a good dose of exactly what I needed. That is to say, inspiration, a broadening of horizons, and good writing advice. In general, they all made me feel something which is what I wanted.
I’ve also been to a lot of poetry events lately (Verve festival and Lyra festival) so I got to experience work by many brilliant national and international poets that I’d enjoyed before and encountered for the first time, one of whose books I have reviewed below.
I want to make a point of trying to read and review a book by a Palestinian author / poet for every Bibliophilia post from hereon in (I may not always achieve this aim but I shall certainly try), as Palestinian literature has so often been censored and repressed in recent years if not decades. I imagine this is mainly because it reveals so much about the illegal regime that was and is still going on. (You may disagree with me on this point but I won’t be entertaining a debate about it in the comments). Consequently, there have been movements toward making Palestinian literature more accessible. Which is absolutely necessary, considering the wealth of incredible Palestinian poets we have and have had over the years: Mahmoud Darwish, Refaat Alareer, Fady Joudah, Noor Hindi, Mosab Abu Toha, to name a few. My first choice is a collection by recent winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize for American Poets, Fady Joudah, which you can check out below.
But first I’ll start with a classic which I’ve been meaning to read forever and finally did…
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
Of course, King knows a thing or two about writing. In this memoir, he tells you about his journey as a writer, how he started out, his knock-backs, how he developed, how he made it. His writing tips are quite brutal at times, which I liked. Very let’s not waste time, let’s get straight to the point. He says to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader, period. (Check). In his own way, he tells you to kill your darlings. (Almost check – sometimes, there’s a line you really like and want to keep, you know?). He also says one should get a good sounding board, someone with a keen critical eye for quality who will tell you if your write isn’t working (Um…).
I found one of his writing tips so charming – that every writer should be writing for someone in particular, as in, who is it you’re trying to impress? He says a lot of writers have a particular reader in mind who is their real intended audience, as it fuels their desire to write better. Usually, it’s a significant other or someone the writer is secretly fond of and may wish to win the favour of. Nothing wrong with that, says King. It acts as a positive motivational force that makes for good writing. I guess you could say that person, “the object of desire”, becomes the writer’s muse.
For King, it’s his own wife, who is also a writer and who he fell for at university when she got up to read a poem at one of their ultra-intellectual poetry gatherings. (He does also mention that she was wearing black lacy stockings at the time which may have been a factor). He seeks her critical eye after a first or second draft and if she’s not impressed, he knows the book’s not up to much. He tells us how if it wasn’t for her faith in him, Carrie would have stayed in the waste paper basket. Instead, Tabitha fished it out, read it, and convinced him it was good, at which point he completed it and sent it off to the publishers. This subsequently gave him his first big break, which got him and his family off the breadline.
He backs up his tips with real life examples, also using other successful writers to prove his point. Overall, this memoir-cum-writing manual is such a motivating read. Highly recommend.
tethered to stars by Fady Joudah
This is Joudah’s fifth collection of poetry and is quite simply, a sumptuous, multi-layered and altogether cosmic read. It made my brain tingle as more than one interpretation sprang to mind with lines that jumped out at me. This is poetry you have to peel slowly to get to the heart of, it’s so potent with ambiguity. There are rich turns of phrase and an air of knowing wisdom, a musicality and a mysticism that reminded me of Rumi.
So many lines are thinkers. This one in particular stayed with me: “That your sadness unbuttons my heart, kneads its clowns” (from The Holy Embraces the Holy).
And “I also learned that singularity is achieved only when one is torn to irreconcilable pieces” (from Sandra Bland, Texas). So many poems I loved, like Calligraphy for a Sagittarius, Problems of Moon Language and Domicile, House, Cusp.
There is a feeling of being earthbound but always connected to the greater universe, as if by way of anchoring himself, and processing the different personal losses he has undergone in life. There is an interplay between life and death, a dance even, threaded throughout with the lexicon of the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm, astrology and astronomy, and journeying beyond the limits of what one can contain, knowingly, emotionally, past the physical, and yet also acknowledging the miracle of the physical.
He juxtaposes images that reflect a sense of maximus to the microcosmic particle, the space between raindrops and the long stretching night, a migrating group of birds to a tiny drop of pollen, each thing meaning something entirely other in the poem (like, wait, the poem about the pollen was kind of erotic?), so his verse does require close reading and rereading to work your way through the layers.
I plan to read his other collections at some point but I’m glad I started with this cosmic chunk of beauty. Highly recommend. You can also read some of his poems here.
I Am I Am I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
This is gripping from the first page, what can I say. Beautifully candid, deeply wise and at times, heart-rending, O’Farrell tells you, chapter by chapter, about her seventeen near-death experiences. That’s right, seventeen. She has the worst luck, or the best luck, depending on how you look at it as essentially, she has more lives than a cat and somehow survives to tell each tale.
From calamities with water, food poisoning, childbirth, to crazy stalker men – whilst hiking through the English countryside, travelling through South America, and trying to breastfeed a child on a long stretch of road in the South of France – you are mortified (and also a little thrilled by the whole fear factor, if I’m honest) and relieved she manages to escape. By the skin of her teeth, mind. To read about it is to shudder, knowing they are the true accounts of a woman just minding her own business, trying to do her best to navigate her (mis)adventure called life. Granted, she does have a great love of travelling which leads her through some hairy territory, but she doesn’t go out of her way to seek trouble. (Well, there is this one time…but you can find out for yourself).
As an individual, she’s also a hardworking writer and teacher who wants to settle down and have a family with her longstanding boyfriend, a decent job and place to live – the average person’s noble dream. But she gets more than she bargained for, and has to, at times, barter for her life or be rescued. Most of the time, she has to save herself.
I highly recommend this bold brave memoir, not just because it’s beautifully written with moments of insightful premonition, but because it’s true. Moving, shocking, and not always an easy read but a life-affirming read that makes you aware of your own mortality. And dreams aside, it inspires you to appreciate all your present life has to offer. It may put you off travelling, however.
A Friend’s Kitchen by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi (translated by Bryan Bajalan and Shook)
This is Al-Raddi’s sixth poetry collection to date. I was lucky enough to get a copy and see him perform at a recent poetry showcase on Translation and Displacement. Here poets talked about their daily experiences mediating between two cultures and how this informs their singular identity, which may at times feel rootless.
Al-Raddi is considered to be one of Africa’s greatest living poets writing in the Arabic language. He is currently living in exile in London as war broke out in his home country whilst he was visiting the UK twelve years ago, and because of the threat to his life if he had returned (he was the cultural editor of a popular newspaper in Sudan and as he was against the dictatorship this was reflected in his work) he has remained in London ever since under amnesty with refugee status.
In a recent conversation with translator Bajalan, Al-Raddi describes poetry as “our failing attempts at relief.” His poems reflect how we have an inherent need to make roots, but being an outsider, everything prevents you from doing so, and so you end up becoming someone else in order to survive. This conflict of identity and belonging was evident as he performed and it was an incredibly moving reading. The host poet would first read the poem in its English translation then Al-Raddi would read it in Arabic. It was lovely to follow the arc of the words already knowing the narrative having heard the poem in English beforehand. (Sidenote: Al-Raddi can speak English fairly well but he chose to read in his mother tongue).
His poems are written in a dadaist stream of consciousness style, told in fragments, as a way of bypassing any sense of self-censorship while writing, and which reflect the poet’s loss of homeland and follow the journey of someone he loves but whom he is separated from. I can’t really put into words the atmosphere he generated, but he had such a gentle powerful aura that it made everyone quite emotional (at one point his voice broke whilst reading and he had to take a long pause; you could feel his heavyheartedness along with the well of unspoken support in the room) as he expressed his longing for a home he couldn’t return to, which had ceased to be home, and so much else I can only imagine.
No doubt, as with many translations, some nuances of the poem may have been compromised in its translation but the translators made it their mission to keep it as true to the original as possible. A culturally enriching experience. I highly recommend this beautiful little book. You can purchase a copy through the Poetry Translation Centre. You can also read some of his poems here.
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Damn, these posts gets longer every time. I can’t seem to control myself when I start chatting about books. And what are you reading at the moment, fellow readers? 📖 Have you come across any of the above? Are they clasped now in your hands with your nose buried between the covers? If not, whose world are you lost in right now? What is languishing in your to-read pile? Feel free to share in the comments ☺️👇
© N Nazir 2024
Sunra Rainz 