Reviews and Features

Martyn Crucefix Mulberry and Oleander

Fawzi Karim
Plague Lands and other poems (Versions by Anthony Howell, after translations by Abbas Kadhim) Carcanet £12.95

Brian Turner
Phantom Noise, Bloodaxe £8.95

Elyse Fenton
Clamor, Cleveland State University Poetry Center $16.95

Fawzi Karim was born in Baghdad in 1945 and already felt an internal exile by the late 1960s, leaving permanently for London in 1978. Plague Lands and other poems contains the forty-page title poem from 1995, plus nineteen others and Karim’s stance emerges as resolutely non-political and individualistic. The essay by Marius Kociejowski included here makes it evident that even amongst the complex currents of dissident thinking in Iraq from the 1960s on, Karim’s hatred of ideology of any colour, his devotion to ‘The Voice of Inner Life’ (as the title of one poem puts it), has long set him apart and remains the driving force in his work. He talks of the mulberry and oleander trees from his childhood – the one full of light, the other dark, bitter and poisonous – and their corresponding values recur in his work: ‘I felt it impossible to believe, either religiously or ideologically, in any one thing. I am divided on the inside’.

Truth to this inner struggle is manifest in all Karim writes, much of the substance of which is gleaned from memories of his early years – boats on the Tigris, his father and mother in the Karkh area of Baghdad, the courtyard of their house, and later the Gardenia Bar where he’d gather with like-minded intellectuals, even then the barrier falling between himself and ‘the era, between me and its dogma’ (‘Plague Lands’). Written in free verse – itself an act of artistic and political independence – ‘Plague Lands’ roams across autobiographical material, fluently transitioning from era to era, country to country. Its evocation of Karkh is vivid:

Houses as precarious as stacked-up disks of bread;
Their window-nets like tattered sieves;
Their doors holding their breath in case there’s a call in the night.

But the area was razed to make way for Saddam’s palace gardens, so the act of remembering also has political resonance. Karim’s modest declaration, ‘I just tend to dredge up what I can from memory’ is powerfully countered by his use of a military metaphor –‘and mobilise my finds against the present’–in ‘Plague Lands’.

The liberty he holds dear extends to verse that skips from biographical to historical to mythic. Indeed, Karim suggests the best poetry ‘has to neglect historical time and go beyond it’. So in the midst of Baghdad’s street life, we also hear the characters of Gilgamesh and Enkidu discussing the recurrent nature of history and tyranny. But it is the emotions of the individual in exile that are likely to strike readers of these translations most powerfully. Karim speaks ‘from the lands of the living’ but always sings ‘of the lands of the plague’. The past haunts and paranoia never abates with a nervous checking of locked doors and windows. Such truthful variety in individual human response is Karim’s true subject because this is precisely what repressive regimes intend to stamp out. The poet seeks something beyond the marble statue, beyond the framework of bone, in hope of ‘An articulate warmth: the ultimate promise of speech’ (‘A Marble Woman’). Certainly, the newscaster’s version of events flickers behind these poems – the butchering of King Faisal in 1958, the Ba’thists coming to power in 1968, Baghdad lit up like a Christmas tree by Coalition bombing in January 1991 – but Karim sees them from a mythic, eternal perspective and in the end concludes that the true condition of mankind is more accurately portrayed in ‘The Last Gypsies’:

We trek across the distance without pursuing a clue,
Without being fixed on some glory interred in the ruins...
A body forever in transit,
              heavy with the taste of tears.

In his debut collection, Here, Bullet, Brian Turner found a poetic voice of object and action capable of taking the pressure of the real as he experienced it fighting in Iraq. That collection carefully balanced poems on the US soldier’s experiences with those of Iraqi civilians and gave space to Arabic culture and language, so only the wilfully obtuse would accuse him of colonizing rather than accessing this critical other. Turner’s culture-blind exercises of the sympathetic imagination lie at the root of his powerful and important poems and the Wilfred Owen who mourned the ‘doomed youth’ of 1916, would agree with him that – no matter from which side of war’s divide – ‘Tragedy is in the unfinished life’ (‘Notes from an Iranian Prisoner of War Camp’).

Even in Here, Bullet, Turner suggested that rockets launched over Hamman al Alil, continue to travel, falling eventually ‘in the night sky of the skull, down long avenues / of the brain’s myelin sheathing’ (‘Katyusha Rockets’). This is where Phantom Noise picks up with poems set in America but into which events from war- torn Iraq intervene. So ‘VA Hospital Confessional’ adopts a breathless tone of litany to evoke recurring nightmares: ‘I tell no one, but sometimes late at night / I uncover rifles and bullets within me’. Life is distorted by surrealism as supermarket cash registers sound like machine guns and dead soldiers are laid out ‘on the black conveyor belts’ (‘At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center’). On occasions, this device feels a little mechanical, but seeing it through the eyes of a girlfriend (as in ‘Illumination Rounds’) or initiating the narrative in the dream memory, as in ‘Wading Out’ whirls the reader into bewildering and frightening experiences:

no one’s laughing anymore, the months turning
into years gone by and still I’m down there slogging
shoulder-deep into the shit.
(‘Wading Out’)

Evoking post-traumatic experiences pushes Turner’s work into new areas and in a poem on the stampede on the Al-A’imma Bridge in 2005, where almost a thousand people died, he echoes Karim’s method of placing the event in history. He even has Gilgamesh moving through the narrative at one point and, as specifically named Iraqis – ‘Shatha and Cantara and Sabeen, / Hakim’ – fall to their deaths:

Alexander the Great falls, and King Faisal,
    and the Israeli F-16s that bombed the reactor in ’81,
and the Stele of the Vultures comes crumbling,
    the Tower of Samarra, the walled ruins of Nineveh.
(‘Al-A’imma Bridge’)

There is some risk in Turner’s desire to move beyond the depiction of brute reality as his language remains plain – a ‘bullet-borne language’, the title poem calls it – and in the absence of urgent and shocking subject matter and in reaching for more abstract and sweeping statements, Turner flirts with the banal: ‘The year 1956 slides under, along with ’49 and ’31 and ’17, / the month of October, the months of June, July, and August’ (‘Al- A’imma Bridge’). Another consequence is that Phantom Noise lacks the focus of its predecessor. This is reinforced by the inclusion of poems of childhood, though what emerges from these memories is often an undercurrent of violence. The destruction of a beached whale, making homemade napalm with his father, Bruce Lee films, a car crash – all suggest the boy is proleptically exploring connections with what will haunt his future, what ‘.22 Caliber’ calls ‘the small dark silence / carried within the center of all things’ .

Relationships also suffer the lasting impact of war, though Turner suggests some relief in several concluding love poems. No explicit reference to war is made as a couple wander round an art exhibition though both are thinking about last night’s love-making in the park when lawn sprinklers drenched them. In the context, this is a baptismal, cleansing, cooling, affirmation of love in the face of so much bloodshed. It is welcome proof of the spirit to survive, though Turner’s language gets a little over-insistent in ways that he so triumphantly avoids in the more explicit ‘war’ poems:

this is what I’m thinking about in the museum,
the skeletons of art hung around us, petrified,
staring through the hard lenses of framing and oil,
staring at us from their fossilised stations
in the past, in wonder, marvelling at
these two lovers, here, each of us
fully given to the inexorable process
of death, and yet, here we are
walking among them – alive.
(‘In the Guggenheim Museum’)

Elyse Fenton’s first collection, Clamor, explores the impact of the war on an American woman whose husband has enlisted. As a contribution to the diversity of poetic voices on modern warfare, the book is important and has won prizes from Cleveland State University and the Dylan Thomas Award from the University of Wales. There are marvellous poems here – Fenton’s skill with word and image is frequently clear – though there is also unevenness, and a willed self-consciousness about the project that sometimes leaves me uneasy.

‘Gratitude’ is placed before any narrative thread is evident and is an astonishing poem. As often in what follows, Fenton’s narrator is reporting a phone conversation with her husband who has had to deal with a soldier wounded ‘beyond recognition’. The collection explores the boundary between horror and tenderness and this is captured in the line break as the wounds are described: ‘the ruptured scaffolding of ribs, the glistening skull, and no skin // left untended’. The husband has to insert a catheter into the wounded man’s penis, his ‘last good flesh’, and because of the gender of the narrator this delicate attempt to save the soldier’s life also becomes imbued with a touching, almost marital sexuality:

Listen. I know the way the struck chord begins
to shudder, fierce heat rising into the skin of my own
sensate palms.

In this startling way, the poem achieves what Brian Turner argues about the totality of Clamor, that it ‘connects the forward operating bases in Iraq with the homefront’; but once the narrator’s reflections on distance, love and danger get underway, such intensity and originality are not always achieved. Early poems engage with language in interesting ways. ‘Love in Wartime (1)’ dismisses the postmodern conception of language as merely made up of ‘signifiers’, that reality is a construct of competing discourses, ‘an uncoupling dance’. Fenton wants words to correspond to the living reality of ‘your mouth & its live wetness, your tongue / & its intimate knowledge of flesh’. There are signs of a fascinating tension between the contrasting language use of lovers and poets, broadcasters and the military, yet as the collection continues Fenton herself finds it hard to resist deliberations about language which begin to intervene between the urgency and drama of her subject and her self-conscious resolve to complete the sequence of poems. The dedication of the collection reads:

I want to gather you up
into a book whose pages clink

like bone cockles gavelled smooth
in the blood-wash of unimagined shore –

Perhaps such troubled distancing is what concerns Fenton but I feel the poet’s image-making predominates and grows detached. A windy day is described as ‘flowering the brown lawn / with the dead gloved thumbs of leaves like a rusted // poppy-strafed field’ (‘Veteran’s Day’). As the subject of love poetry, the husband is distinguished only by his absence with Fenton a bit too cunningly imaging him in one case as a ‘stranded noun’ (‘Your Plane Arrives from Iraq for the Last Time’), and in another as a ‘verb-less object’ (’Infidelity’). Clamor also draws Classical parallels, which can feel forced. Fenton alludes several times to Dante, with the narrator’s husband again reduced to no more than a ‘shade’. This reminds me of Heaney’s Station Island (1984) in which he regrets his earlier use of ‘the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio’ in writing a poem about the murder of Colum McCartney in Field Work (1979). The comparison is not fair on Fenton, of course, but it does return us to the vexed question of war poetry, to Owen’s determination that the poetry should be in the pity – rather than something superimposed and serving to divorce us from a subject that paradoxically demands our most vigilant and sensitive respect.