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Biographical note:  Ali Alizadeh is an award-winning Iranian-born Australian poet. He migrated to Australia after living through the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, and is a writer of poetry, criticism and plays. The major themes of his works are history, dissent and the dilemmas of religion and spirituality. He holds a PhD in writing from Deakin University Melbourne, and this is his second book. He is currently living and teaching writing in China.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712878
ISBN-10:  1844712877
ISBN-13:  9781844712878
Author:  Ali Alizadeh
Title:  Eyes in Times of War
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-06
Extent:  148pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  222 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 10.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This collection of poems speaks to an individual’s place and emotions during war. The wars depicted in this volume – the ‘history wars’, the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, ‘the war against terror’, ‘the clash of civilisations’, etc – form the background against which the speaker’s language seethes and writhes. These fractured lyrics – or ‘antiheroic couplets’ – take place in a volatile space in the aftermath of ancient conquests and prior to future atrocities. Here the medieval Persian poet Rumi is seen escaping the Mongolian hordes; Satan debates Archangel Michael at the battle of Heaven and Hell; the Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin contemplates the Holocaust; an imprisoned writer becomes a saviour and a revolutionary radical is branded traitor; an account of the author’s experiences of the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the war with Saddam Hussein is narrated; and contemporary Australia is seen as a nation engaged in an unremitting conflict against the land’s original inhabitants and its Asian neighbours. History and a desire for peace form the central discourse of this book’s poems that deconstruct the desire for war, undermine the beliefs in religious and cultural identity that often provoke wars, and advocate non-participation and a rejection of the glorification of ‘us’ and the demonisation of the ‘other’. Also included in this volume are love poems and translations from works of Sufi mystics to show that the opposite of war is, if not always allowed, then at the very least imaginable in these times of hostility and conflict.

Meet the author:

Podcasts

Play I, the Monster (2.1 MB)


Play Immigration (2.7 MB)


Play The Honest Truth (2.6 MB)


Play Windows #3 (1.7 MB)


Play Writer in Prison (2.5 MB)


Play Your Terrorist (2.8 MB)

Table of contents:
Monsters
I, the Monster
War Narrative
I Am Filth
Apostasy
Your Terrorist
Happy Immigrant
The Clash
The Wind of Sheba
A Ghazal by Attar
Battles
In Times of War
The Incinerator
Australia
France
The Opium
The Next Superpower
The Traitor
Immigration
The Honest Truth
Embers
Rumi
Three Quatrains by Rumi
A Ghazal by Rumi
Beaten
Annihilation
A Ghazal by Attar
Writer in Prison
Iran
Eyes in Times of War
Angelus Novus
Good Idea?
Barfly
The Hermit
This Thing
Golden Girl by R. Shiri
A Ghazal by Hafez
My People
Retrospect
Teeth in Times of War (for 8 October 2001)
The Ghosts (from elixir: a story in poetry)
ABC (from elixir: a story in poetry)
A Memory
Princess
The Fruiting
Out of Water
Lover's Name
You're the Sentinel
Windows #3

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Excerpt from book:  

Windows #3

I opened the windows and saw the giant flags
black and red, they had covered the winds
the tyranny of human symbols and arms
had mangled the air and veiled the sky.

Then I saw a bird, unspecific small bird
blue with yellow tail and clipped wings
tied to a flagpole with a tight metal string
its beak bound by grey masking tape.

It was too much for me, the oppression
I threw myself out the window and then
the bird caught the fire of my suicide
and flames raged up the firm flagpole.

And in the glory of freed wings
one by one the flags of the prison caught fire
and wind stormed again, sky was freed
the bird flew up to join the mating flocks.

I raised, shook off the blood and restarted the heart
and approached to open another window.

Unpublished endorsement :  Ali Alizadeh is a young poet struggling to make sense of a cruel and chaotic world. He strives for a language that can fuse reality and myth, youthful longings and ancient wisdom, the spiritual and the materialistic. He draws upon many influences, ranging from the poet’s Persian traditions, to poetic traditions both ancient and modern, East and West. Idealism and disillusion stalk side by side. Love duels with anger. The most moving poems document the author’s journey from Iran to Australia and his youthful quest for love. The result is a work-in-progress that lays bare the poet’s desperate struggle for inner peace and meaning in a world engaged in seemingly endless warring and demonisation

Arnold Zable

Unpublished endorsement :  In our time which is, against all hopes, a century of war, when fundamentalist rhetoric has taken on new life in a cosmic phantasmagoria of destruction and hatred, Ali Alizadeh's fast-moving poetry holds us to today’s issues of identity and culture, its dilemmas of allegiance and responsibility. The drama of humanity’s complex heritage has no more relevant or urgent voice.

Judith Rodriguez

Previous review quote:  In its multiple rendering, you can read [eliXir: a story in poetry] as a play, then as a story, then experience it as a poem, at different points and very often simultaneously. Alizadeh does his tale with speed while sucking in our senses with a compelling simplicity that awes with admiration. The pace is varied and the style indicates a craft of narrative economy.

Patrick Mangeni
TEXT: The Journal of Australian Association of Writing Programs

Previous review quote:  [Alizadeh’s] eliXir – like the fabled liquor sought by alchemists from which [it] takes its name – is a potent concoction … its after-effects are as powerful as they are thought provoking.

Roger Williams
Beat

Previous review quote:  A talent to watch.

Chris Mansell
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