Trying Again to Stop Time: Selected Poems

✍ Scribed by Barzanji, Jalal

• Book ID: 109987138
• Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 104 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781772120431

✦ Synopsis

"It's a losing battle:my words have no chance against time.Sometimes,unable to catch up with imagination,I leave the battle, candle in hand,in complete darkness."— from "Trying Again to Stop Time"Jalal Barzanji chronicles the path of exile and estrangement from his beloved native Kurdistan to his chosen home in Canada. His poems speak of the tension that exists between the place of one's birth and an adoptive land, of that delicate dance that happens in the face of censorship and oppression. In defiance of Saddam Hussein's call for sycophantic political verse, he turns to the natural world to reference a mournful state of loss, longing, alienation, and melancholy. Barzanji's poetry is infused with the richness of the Middle East, but underlying it all is a close affinity to Western Modernists. In those moments where language and culture collide and co-operate, Barzanji carves out a strong voice of opposition to political oppression. Readers will return to his work again...