The Wrong Person to Ask
Marjorie Lotfi, Bloodaxe, £10.99

Night Settles Upon the City
Omar Sabbagh, Darajah Press, £12.29
      

BIG poetry prizes often seem to go to work that is much more accessible to literary folk and other poets than to less specialised readers. But this is not in the least true of The Wrong Person to Ask, by Marjorie Lotfi, which has just won the prestigious Forward Prize for Best First Collection. 

Lotfi is the child of an Iranian father and American mother, and has early memories of her family’s flight from Iran in 1978 after the ayatollahs came to power – as she writes in The Game: “the game of hiding mother/ on the way to the airport/ father at the barrier/ while we went on ahead.”

The collection’s first half includes poems of exile and the experiences of a refugee: in Alarm I she remembers her school in Iran being set on fire with the pupils still in it, and in Alarm II her later US school practising an evacuation in case of a nuclear attack by the Russians. There are vivid memories of her lost Iranian family, and of the smells and sights of her childhood. Other poems encompass the Middle East traumas in Syria and Gaza. 

In the second half, she speaks of life in the UK, and of where she now lives in Scotland. In After the Match, a mother imagines her dead son – a Hillsborough victim – coming back late from the match; in Sunday on the Luing Sound, Lotfi sees a homing fishing boat: “its iridescent belly barnacled/ below the surface, hand-tied buoys flailing in wind/ like a fistful of carnival balloons.”

The question of any exile — where is home? — is a theme running through the whole collection. The very last piece celebrates a solitary crab apple tree that clings to an uninhabited Hebridean island, concluding: “And what is home, if not the choice  –/ over and over again – to stay?”

In his collection Night Settles Upon the City, Omar Sabbagh tackles a different question: how does a poet respond when war comes to his city? A British Lebanese poet, he now lives in Beirut, and his collection, published very quickly, begins with a Diary of the War, his real-time responses. 

This section includes some powerful pieces: Besieged begins: “It is morning again, but they have killed/ the morning. The book of life is blood-smattered/ and death is all we read.” In Noises of War: “Sirens wail their way across the streets below,/ and once again, the distance between life/ and death intoxicates the air.”

As is well known, Lebanon has an ethnically fragmented population, and the current bombing of Beirut has so far mostly targeted its Shia southern districts. So, although Sabbagh lives in the same city, he repeatedly questions the privilege of being able to write poetry in the as-yet relative safety of its wealthier western suburbs. One section of this collection has the title Poetry Makes Nothing Happen, referencing a well-known quote of the poet W H Auden, and also an included poem (see the Morning Star of October 31 2024) https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/poetry-makes-nothing-happen.

While the war is a heavy presence in this collection, as with Lotfi, family and other topics also surface. Both Sabbagh’s father and his daughter Alia figure; in Watching His Father Grieve Sabbagh finishes: “But when it’s the son of someone you’ve known your whole life’s beating/ who dies,/ it’s like a window falling out of your eyes.” And The Old Man And His Walking Stick brings war and family together, beginning: “It gets worse each day, watching him/ aging, the drain that seems to drag/ at his limbs” and finishing with “an old man and his son, fighting a war/ in a warzone we all must visit.”