The poems in Hasan Alizadeh’s House Arrest are translated and introduced by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould. What I got out of them was above all streams of vivid and expressive images. Like Fan in The Ink Cloud Reader, Alizadeh weaves together strands from different cultural traditions. Some of his poems relate to Iranian public life, some to the Old and New Testaments or Greek and Roman mythology, some apparently to the personal experience of the poet himself. The introduction tells us that he started as a short story writer. His poems usually do involve story but their fundamental impulse is lyrical. Taking the overall narrative arc for granted, they tend to present one moment within it in an extremely vivid way, suggesting an emotion or complex of emotions. This is true even of a poem like ‘Feuilleton’. It begins with something that as well as being a startling image looks like an intriguing narrative hook:

I fell in love with a sweet-lipped
bitter-eyed

girl from Balkh.

Not much develops from this hook, however. We’re told, in a summary way, what went wrong with the relationship: the poet delighted in the girl’s ‘body whiter than jasmine’ and her ‘flower-scented lips’, but was too young and careless to be interested in her mind:

I had nothing to do with her strange
sweet & bitter girlish dreams.

To me it’s disappointing that her sweetness and bitterness are simply repeated, taken as given, not explored imaginatively. There’s a kind of flatness there. The poem ends with the speaker’s haunting sense of loss, expressed in a sad cadence reminiscent of the end of some of Ezra Pound’s Cathay poems – ‘I sigh and sigh’. However, what ‘Feuilleton’ doesn’t have is the compelling, intricately dynamic narrative life of a poem like Pound’s ‘Exile’s Letter’ as it evolves towards its wistful conclusion.

Sometimes the images of these poems are anchored in literal-seeming scenarios and sometimes, as in ‘Old Testament, New Testament’, they’re of a more fantastical kind, dissolving and reforming like pictures in a dream. Some work as momentarily living, camera flash glimpses into imagined situations. Some have a wider but more indefinite resonance, like the beautiful single line ‘The silence of the sirens’ songs’ forming the final section of ‘Margins’, six micropoems about Ulysses’ return. Most of the poems in this book work very well on this imagistic level. Admittedly they sometimes fail to come as fully alive as wholes as the vitality of individual phrases suggests they should. Whatever may be the case in the original, in translation these less successful poems seem to me to lack expressive life in their rhythms and syntax. Fortunately, and it’s to the translators’ credit that this should be so, there are others in which parts and even whole poems do achieve rhythmical beauty and expressiveness.

A fundamental similarity between Alizadeh’s and Fan’s books is that they both reflect the tensions and interweaving of cultures that is such a feature of the twentieth and twenty-first century world. In this way, they both bring challenging and widening perspectives to the reader’s grasp of the world. A fundamental difference, however, is in the fact that Alizadeh’s poems are translated and Fan’s are not. Another is that where Alizadeh seems essentially a lyrical poet, Fan is a much more conceptual figure who, for all the beauty of his touches of lyricism, explicitly presents himself as  wrestling with ideas, and in doing so draws the reader into sharing the evolution of those ideas within and between the poems.

Hasan Alizadeh, translated and introduced by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould, House Arrest, 98pp, £10.99, Arc Publications, 2022

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom and Holly Hopkins for their permission to post this review, which appeared in the North issue 70.