Many, even most of the poems in Imtiaz Dharker’s Shadow Reader present some form of suffering, cruelty, oppression or abuse. However, they don’t cloud our impressions of these things by pushing the poet’s own emotions at us; presenting scenes and situations in a gently understanding way, with a polished musicality of sound, they let the beauty or cruelty of what they show speak for itself, in all its subtlety of nuance and overtone. In other ways, they’re highly varied in style and imaginative mode. Some offer what appear to be direct accounts of literal events, letting broader metaphorical or representative suggestions shine through by implication; some, at an opposite extreme, are like pieces of fairytale or myth; many include elements of both. The lovely ‘For the Girl on the Elizabeth Line’ is an example of the first mode. Its language seems simple and transparent, achieving power by a sudden deepening of tone in lines three to five:

Standing by the door
the way young people do,
as if a seat is a waste
of life, you are lost

in each other.

Only in the third stanza does it emerge that what we’re seeing isn’t the scene of joyful young love it seems at first glance. The whole poem reverberates with complex suggestions of power, oppression and helplessness, both in the couple and in the passengers who silently watch them. The way our understanding of the couple’s relationship changes is a wonderfully delicate evocation of how liable we are to misinterpret our fleeting glimpses of other lives. At an opposite extreme, formally speaking, we have the sonnet ‘For the Woman Who Changed Back to a Snake’. Addressed to the woman / snake by someone who may be her mother, this poem seems to create an original, profoundly ambiguous myth related to the myth of Persephone and folk tales of the selkie or seal woman. Its vivid, highly wrought language makes a series of intensely sensuous imagistic impressions so that on one level it’s very concrete. It might be called abstract on another because we can read such very different stories into the chain of metaphors. These stories converge to suggest ideas and feelings about female beauty and the habitual mistreatment and proper respectful treatment of women in a way that’s the more powerful and the more wide-reaching for being indirect. There’s a tragic interpretation by which the daughter addressed can only escape abuse by dying. Here’s the sestet:

They can say you vanished. You made the choice
to fall into the earth’s waiting arms
and find the tongue you lost, your silenced voice,
away from man’s narrow gaze and casual harm,

back to the place that calls you goddess, queen,
and shivers at the power of your skin.

That sends shivers down my spine. So much is happening, such huge forces seem to collide within the gravely measured lines. For example, in a reading that links this poem with ‘For the girl whose hair escaped’ – perhaps inspired by the famous case of Mahsa Amini, whose murder by Iran’s morality police sparked such widespread protest – there’s contempt for evasive authority, respect for the woman’s strength, pity and indignation at the repression of women’s voices, joyful awe at the power of female beauty when properly seen, and SO MUCH MORE.

Such explosive concentration and absolute commitment to a mythic-metaphorical approach is unusual, even unique in the book. However, vivid, occasionally surreal images appear quite frequently, complementing the more transparent techniques of sympathetic observation. Another essentially metaphorical poem, ‘Out of the rose garden’, opens with the mysterious lines, ‘When you come away from the rose garden / your eyes have changed colour in the rain’. One of my favourite poems that works essentially and startlingly by metaphor is the savagely beautiful, untitled three liner,

But the roses are savages
…….that will eat you
alive, given the chance.

This is a volume that weaves together a number of separate but related concerns and creates a quiet interplay between them. The lighter textured, more explicit poems are important in the total economy of the work because they make it easier to read across between poems and areas of preoccupation. The central focus is often broadly moral and political, but concern with the relations between people as individuals, as members of one or another gender, one or another class or religion, are seen in a wider context of nonhuman life and of mortality, the whole being framed by recurring references to a youthful Dharker’s early visit to a fortune teller or ‘shadow reader’ who predicted the year of her death, supposedly the year of composition of the book.

As in other Dharker’s other books from Bloodaxe, the writing is amplified by her own fine black and white drawings.

Imtiaz Dharker, Shadow Reader, 160 pp, £12.99, Bloodaxe Books

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 71.