I PICKED THIS up in the Barbara’s Bookstore outpost at O’Hare Airport. My flight had been cancelled the night before, my rebooked flight was going to be delayed four hours, and I had finished reading everything I had brought along, so I was feeling sorry for myself as I browsed for more reading material.
I might have passed this book up had I not recently read a poem by Toha in the most recent (and final, apparently) Best American Poetry, but since I was impressed by that poem (“Two Watches”), I thought, well, this is probably a good bet. As it happened, I finished it before my flight took off.
It’s not only a fine collection, but also a quick cure for any self-pity, or at least the self-pity of someone whose worst problem is a cancelled flight. Most of Toha’s poems are about living in Gaza, as his family has since 1948, and the problems of living in Gaza after having been dispossessed of one’s home and forced into exile make even the worst of my problems seem hardly even to deserve the designation “problem.”
And the book was published in 2022–that is, well before the horrors of the last two years.
The book includes an interview with Toha. The interviewer does not ask him why he writes poetry in English rather than Arabic, but we do learn he began studying English at an early age and was much influenced by such classics as Marlowe, Shelley, “Kublai Khan,” and The Waste Land. I wonder if he writes poetry in Arabic as well; bi-lingual poets are rare but not unheard of (e.g., Amelia Rosselli).
The book obviously qualifies as “poetry of witness,” but is also better-than-usual poetry. Toha uses anaphora effectively (see “Home,” “To Ibrahim Kilani,” and “To My Visa Interviewer”), and the longer poems—“Palestine A-Z” and “The Wounds”—are extraordinarily well sustained.
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