Dr Patrick Lodge was kind enough to send us a draft of his review of Vahid’s pamphlet. The review, which appears in the current issue of Dream Catcher magazine, can be read below:
Something the Colour of Pines on Fire Poems by Vahid Davar
(Matecznik Press, 2022) £5
ISBN 978-1-9160847-1-1
This short pamphlet must serve as only an introduction to the poetry of Vahid Davar, an Iranian refugee who came to Britain in 2013. The collection largely consists of extracts from two major collections in Persian and published, in absentia, in 2018/19. The pamphlet, self-translated by the poet whose facility in English is exceptional, contains, as he writes, “all my semi-self-translated exodus poems”. It is a remarkable collection in its scope, imaginative power, verbal dexterity and strong emotional heft – it should be required reading for all Home Secretaries.
Davar has written that “he fled from a burning homeland, scorched and almost smothered” and, unsurprisingly, the experience suffuses all the poems here, not least the three sections from the superb “Nassim’s Testament” sequence. This is a tour-de-force of inspired creativity that seamlessly blends the asylum-seekers’ experiences with religious, historical, literary and other cultural references without ever losing the polemical punch. Davar has described the sequence as a kind of “wake” and, as such, it “laments, tells tales, cracks jokes, performs dances and experiments with various modes of poetic expression”.
Davar saw his escape to the UK as an opportunity to “re-visualise” himself and adopts a subtle alter ego and a companion witness, Nassim, a non-gendered resurrection of his close friend, the poet Nassimi who had killed himself several years before Davar’s arrival in the UK. Here are two suffering voices as one - “I, who am both Nassim and Vahid” (The Bright Salt) - who join in “a combined act of creation”.
Davar describes his main technique in exploring his journey as “ventriloquising” – in effect, Vahid and Nassim project other voices – Davar worked, in Liverpool, as an interpreter for other refugees – which allows the poet to adopt a protean self and roam wild and free across time and cultures. In a sense the poet ceases to exist: he has noted that crossing continents in an Ark-like shipping container - like Jonah in the whale, the story that prompts Davar’s cover art - a person becomes immaterial, can drift like a spirit through anything - they become “ghosts / who fled at midnight in a shipping container”(The Bright Salt). The poetry magically and skilfully reflects this as Vahid and Nassim are “suspended in mid-air” hanging between Shiraz and Liverpool unable to root anywhere but using that disassociation to make seamless transitions between Iran and the UK, history and the present, real and imagined.
Davar - himself an artist - makes several references to artworks and has termed his approach ekphrastic but it seems less that the poems respond to particular paintings than that Vahid and Nassim inhabit them – notably Rembrandt’s “The Sacrifice of Isaac” and Breughel’s “The Fall of the Rebel Angels”. The latter providing a powerful emotional weight to the protagonists’ encounters with the whimsical god UKBA (the UK Border Agency) who presides over the “court on the seashore” which greets refugees identifying “good” refugees and “bad” refugees– “And the English saw / that strange shower…” and like Iranian fishermen, “separate the salmon / from the sole and the starfish”(The Sole and the Salmon).
Davar writes in translation with a seductive lyricism and effortless blending of various mythologies and narratives. Section 8, The Tale Nassim told Nassim, or Maryam Related to Vahid interweaves Halloween, the late Queen Elizabeth and two Iranian fairy tales – which, as Dr Yass Alizadeh has written, were often used as a powerful and urgent response to post-revolutionary Iranian reality and a subversive challenge to the power structure. Throughout Davar utilises an almost Biblical phraseology – “a strongly felt presence” as he once wrote – which elevates his journey into an epic. Davar sees the Bible as a great book of exile – but of relation not separation and, indeed, such epics were written in antiquity precisely to promulgate a people’s legitimacy, to root them in a collective meaning. This sense of “unbelonging”, of being between two worlds, even after “taking an oath in the name of the old woman” and singing “God Bless the Nana”, pervades the collection. The outstanding, Pastoral 1, with its repeated request to “Imagine”, referencing John Lennon’s plea for peace and togetherness from Davar’s new home of Liverpool, ends on the resonant and close to perfect image of un-rootedness and loss, “Imagine / the Smithdown cemetery held your blood relatives.”
The collection ends with “From Sea to Dawn” – a commissioned poem inspired by, and displayed with, a video artwork of the same title by an Iranian collective which intervenes in and subverts common media imagery of migrants. The poem is a fitting close in its optimistic yet grounded realism with its evocations, “O King of Righteousness” to “Wear a life jacket, wear a life jacket” and “O Spirit” to “be a living foil blanket sheeted around us in the cold… Say ‘let there be rotating police beacons’ / And there will be light”.
A subtle end to this masterful pamphlet. There are currently no plans to publish a translation of the full sequences which form the backbone of this work – though the text of Nassim’s Testament, with its Persian original, is included in the British Museum exhibit Atlas of the World (2022). Such a collection would be a major edition to contemporary poetry and an important contribution to any debate about policy on asylum-seekers.
Dr Patrick Lodge
