BOOK REVIEWS
Michael Hulse reviews Dizza Castle, Selected Poems by Salah Niazi Translated by several hands, edited by David Andrews Waterloo Press, UK, 2015 ISBN 978-1906742-74-4, 52 pp, pbk, £10
Our belated recognition
Published in the year he turns eighty, this is the first collection of Salah Niazi’s poems to be published in the country where he has lived for half a century. A weighty poet, critic and editor in his native Arabic, he has also served English well, translating Shakespeare and Joyce. This book marks our belated recognition of a significant, civilized writer.
No surprise, that a poet who went into exile from Iraq in his late twenties should strike a note of longing: “Oh, you, all the trees of the world be my cities. / Oh, the map of the world be my everyday neighbour.” Violence, war and displacement are the ground tenor of a number of the poems: “Tomorrow all homelands will be out of bounds / Gas masks will be rented out on a daily basis like videos.”
Great grief is in Salah Niazi, but so too are warmth, compassion, and a rich love of everyday life. “For twenty years I sell on credit, / And buy on credit,” begins a poem in the voice of a shopkeeper. “The lights have been turned off everywhere. / Why keep an open shop / At this unearthly hour?” In another, an old man is tenderly likened
190 BANIPAL 53 – SUMMER 2015