Book Description

Poetry is as old as human, and as equally organized and chaotic as him. Nothing is as formidably indefinable as poetry. The only difference between prose and poetry is not their verticality; otherwise, all Japanese would be poetry! Defining is limiting. Verse may be definable but poetry is not. Every poet explains poetry as he understands it, and I see it as a flare of fused flow of feeling, fact, and fancy, funneled through a flowery figurative fabric fastidiously fashioned in a flash. It is a dream amid awakening; a chronic fidgeting hither and thither in search of a cornucopia of themes and motifs to be narrated stylishly into outlandish language. The poet hoists his lexical muscles amid his bathroom whistles and the daily bustles and nightly hustles, or amid foliar rustles. The great Italian Romantic poet, Giacomo Leopardi, clarified the function of poetry as not representational but creative. The poet sees the world as it is not; he forges a world, which is not. He is a creator, not an imitator. If the classic axiom of mimesis were to mainstream, poetry would be deemed as a tautologous tact. Therefore, every poem must sound idiosyncratic. And this truth irreducibly finds foothold in poems composed by Siavash Saadlou who has been capable of taming his feelings into melodious aromatic chunks of words, and who has been really able to gather rosebuds while he may. He owns a world like no other. He holds in hand a double-barreled gun; one shooting literary ammunitions, the other shooting literal questions. Characteristically he has much to say, and in an attempt to divide labor, he has committed part of his statements to poetry, which is not the only medium of his expression. Meantime, his bilingual mind can equally accommodate and procure phraseologies and figments that are genuine and unequalled. His motifs are far from simplistic Don Juanism or juvenile calf-love but sophisticated subject matters such as the perennial crusade between fact and fiction. What vexes him colossally are contradictions. Some of the oxymoronic strophes are so virgin brimming with antithetic notions, such as "the thief must have needed the bicycle more than we did"; or the bizarre dialog between two non-conversing entities, or the sense of alienation when love mouths combinations of language and slanguagethe sublime and the subliminal; pieta-like allusive images like "my grandfather died of cancer as I held him in my arms"; ethical references such as "smoking kills"; fresh phrases like "the sound of your breath; the build-up to another kiss"his depiction of the absurdity of life and the way his poetry "encapsulates nothingness" as an in-built refrain. All the above make him sound like a poet for all seasons. (Alireza Ameri, Ph.D.)