Editorial: 15 February 2012

February 09, 2012 Exile, transition and place are predominant themes in the poetry of Mehrdad Arefani, who was born in Iran and, after years of political imprisonment, escaped to Istanbul. Having subsequently moved around Europe, he now lives in Belgium. His nomadic life is reflected in poems such as ‘Room’, in which he ponders the meaning of freedom, asking “What difference does it make being here or in Evin prison/ in a flat in Brussels/ or in a room of the father’s house?/ [. . .] A room is a room, after all”. Elsewhere in his work, he reflects on the way place sculpts memory and identity – even far away from his homeland, he is informed by it. In ‘Suitcase’, for instance, the narrator carries in his hand “Tehran packed in a suitcase full of martyrs”, while ‘Temptation’, set in Tehran, ends with the enigmatic line, “I love my country like a Kit Kat”.

The Ireland domain features six stunning poems by John F. Deane, a highly influential figure in the world of Irish poetry, both as a poet and as an editor and founder of literary organisations such as Poetry Ireland and Dedalus Press. James Harpur writes in his introduction, “Like all profound poets, Deane writes a single poem, but its variations reach out to embrace all of human life, from affecting elegies to celebrations of the grandeur of God.” The theme of love, in different forms, runs through the selection of poems published here too, from ‘Blueberries’, a beautiful, charged love poem, to ‘The Pride of Life’, which draws on the poet’s time as a trainee priest. Most striking are Deane’s gift for lyrical expression and his attention to detail – resonant images linger in the mind after reading these poems: “a fine-curved scar” on an index finger; “the plump and easy-tempered/ fountain pen and the biro, slim-fit” tucked into the breast pocket of a jacket; rabbits playing among the sand dunes “with cloudshadows from the moon”.

Also joining the pages of the Ireland domain is Michael D. Higgins, the recently elected President of Ireland, who, alongside his political career, is a renowned poet. “With Michael D. Higgins,” writes Thomas McCarthy, “it is foolish to try to distinguish between the private agony of poems and the public advocacy of Irish politics. In Ireland, public feeling is honoured in poetry, in the same way that a sense of irony is honoured in the British poetic world.” In a poem such as ‘Betrayal’, in which the poet reflects on the end of his father’s life “in a poorhouse, no longer known by that name”, we see the personal and the political intertwined. This tender elegy to a father is also a history lesson and an indictment of the politics in Ireland at the time. By the end of the poem, the ‘betrayal’ of the title, which might first be seen as the personal betrayal of the son for feeling “in part,/ relieved” when his father was taken into care, has come to represent the son’s indignation for the government’s failure to provide for its poorest citizens. As Thomas McCarthy writes, Higgins’ work “is the poetry of a common humanity; poetry as both voice of feeling and witness document”.

It so happens that in this issue outgoing PIW Ireland editor Patrick Cotter and incoming PIW Iran editor Abol Froushan cross paths. Patrick, director of the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, has worked tirelessly for PIW since 2005, and in that time has introduced over fifty excellent contemporary Irish poets to the readers of PIW. He is handing over editorship of the Ireland domain to Billy Ramsell, who is himself a poet, published on PIW in 2008. Sam Vaseghi, executive editor of the Iran Open Publishing Group, was the inaugural editor of the PIW Iran domain, established in 2009. He has recently passed on his editorial duties to Abol Froushan, a poet and translator who featured on the PIW Iran domain in 2010. We thank Patrick and Sam for their hard work and support and wish them well in their future projects – and we welcome Abol and Billy to the PIW community. Image © Wahlander. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license.