This is the third collection of English poems by the Iranian-born poet, critic and story-writer Mahmud Kianush. For Kianush, poetry has always been the language by which human beings first began to understand themselves and the mysteries of the world around them.
“These are poems that don’t shy away from embracing the spiritual as well as the physical, and there’s a tender, precise sensuality I found really beguiling and engaging.”
Catherine Smith
But suddenly
something happened
Something beyond Nature’s laws,
Something even beyond
God’s expectations,
And Poetry dawned on me
And made me a Human Being.
And now,
It is Poetry that lives in me;
And now I am Poetry Incarnate.
Mahmud Kianush came to Britain with his wife and children in 1976 and for the last 23 years has worked as a freelance producer of cultural programmes for the BBC Persian Section. In 1996 he translated and edited the Rockingham Press anthology Modern Persian Poetry. His previous collections, both published by Rockingham, are Of Birds and Men: Poems from a Persian Divan (2004) and The Amber Shell of Self and other poems (2011). He has translated the works of John Steinbeck, D.H. Lawrence, Federico Garcia Lorca and Samuel Beckett into Persian. He lives in Pitshanger, west London.