AUTHENTIC REALITY
In an age when so many bloggers love to blather on without any real knowledge or experience of the world, when good reporting is so demeaned as to be called Fake News, and when too many poets (especially ‘internet poets’) write obsessively only about themselves, how refreshing it is, indeed how valuable it is, to have a poet who demonstrates clear empathy for those genuinely less fortunate than ourselves, and who bases her work on real lived experience.”
Reviewed by Graham Buchan, author and broadcaster.
BABYLON’S REAWAKENING
There was a time when I couldn’t bring myself to read any kind of poetry partly because some poems are maddeningly opaque, but largely because of an inbuilt prejudice that started when I was at school. In those days, poetry was about understanding the mechanics of iambic pentameters and knowing enough about them to pass an exam. I must have done something right as I got through with flying colours, although analysing rhythm and meter was enough to put me off poetry for most of my adult life.
It was a while before I realised that there’s more to poetry than blank verse, iambic, trochaic, and dactylic pentameters, in much the same way that not every branch of science is about brain busting equations. Poetry is a journey of observation, soul baring, the pleasure or pain of a captured moment, the connection to an emotional stream. British poet Agnes Meadows embodies those qualities in her writing and in Back to Babylon, her seventh poetry collection, she deploys them to haunting effect.
In 2012, 2014, and 2016 Meadows visited Iraq for the Babylon International Festival of Arts and Culture. What she found was a country scarred by the devastation of war, haunted by the appalling crimes of its former dictator Saddam Hussein, yet proud of its rich ancient history. The poems, and their accompanying blog, are a recognition of this and an acknowledgment of the hardship endured by the Iraqi people. The suffering to which they have been exposed over the years is beyond tragic and Meadows brings it into focus with blistering sharpness. In the poem Between One Breath and the Next, the opening line has the force of a gut punch:
“How would you feel, English, if you sent your son to buy bread and he didn’t come back?”
What arises from the question is the outline of a nightmare that few of us will ever experience. There is the frantic search of the streets “calling his name, in case he was laying somewhere, misplaced, waiting for rescue”, the “dreadful knocking of tears that threatened to scythe you open”, the “helicopter beat” of a pounding heart and the loss of hope as the hours slip into darkness. It is a litany of sadness from which there can be no happy ending. As readers we already know the outcome which is why our default position is to turn the page, close the book, or look the other way. An instinctive reaction, or wilful blindness? For Meadows there are no options. She doesn’t resort to finger wagging polemics to explain why we should take notice. Rhetorical questions wrapped in powerful imagery are her weapons of choice, and the combination is extraordinarily effective. We are dragged from our comfort zone, forced to imagine the “blood on the ground, each droplet no longer brilliant”, the raw fear from “the clamour of gunfire in the distance” and how the pain of losing a child is “the ache in your breast an echo of birth pangs”. It is graphic, unsettling writing that sets the tone for some of the collection’s later offerings. For me, Light Within Light is one of the most poignant and disturbing of the poems. An elderly man, “a gardener in the old days”, is literally driven mad by a long futile search for the young daughter who was abducted when she was ten:
“His own orchard of hope; that whenever he said her name, it was as if The Grace of God had blessed his lips, his precious flower.”
He wanders the streets asking strangers if they have seen her, blinkered to the reality that she is lost to him forever. Trauma is cruel, no more so than when a desperate father looks to the earth for the solace that eludes him. Every day he fills his mouth “with dirt, oil black and gritty”, as if somewhere among “the roots of trees, with earthworms, centipedes, or the broken things”, he will find his daughter’s spirit. It is a heart-breaking piece of writing that lingers uncomfortably in the memory. His madness is pitiful, yet Meadows avoids the trap of framing it as a symbol of a broken-down nation. Iraq will never lose its ghosts, but it does have the history of its ancient civilisations and the potential of a future to look forward to.
There’s so much about this collection that I enjoyed. Meadows is an excellent writer who pulls off the trick of making the reader feel involved. It’s not just her Babylon journey but ours too, which is why it’s difficult to run away when the going gets emotionally tough. She doesn’t hide the brutality of the past or tip toe around its violent consequences. The suffering of the Iraqi people is handled with a compassion that brings dignity to both the victims and the survivors. Would the result have been the same if politics had been worked into the poetic mix? I’m not sure, although I’m glad she wasn’t side-tracked into geo-political referencing.
This is a collection that relies on subtlety and intelligence to challenge our perception of a country and its people. Yes, there is violence while everyday living is tough, but the Iraq which emerges from the pages is a land of classical history, with a burgeoning arts scene, generous, warm hearted people, and vibrant splashes of colour. Soldiers with Kalashnikovs are as common as the marigolds “cascading along the cracked paving stones and gutters”, or the red azaleas at the dictator’s palace where walls are “graffitied with the names of lovers so young they had never known heart-break”.
The past may have thrown a heavy shadow, but Iraq has potential and Meadows has written a splendidly crafted work that rings with cautious hope.
Reviewed by Juliette Foster
