Ashes in the Air

by Ali Alizadeh

Strong and thought-provoking, these poems examine themes such as aging, fatherhood, identity, and migration. From the Tehran of the poet's childhood through the Australian coast of his teenage years to the nations visited in his adulthood, this dynamic volume gives voice to the story of a young man and his experiences of discovery. Sharing the hopes of a struggling writer as he explores Australia, China, and the Middle East, this compilation offers a broadened perspective on different ways of life.

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Annie Solah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published: http://benjaminsolah.com/2012/06/14/p...

I used to think there was a divide between ‘page’ and ‘performance’ poetry. I was clearly in the later camp and didn’t think I liked much poetry for the page, except perhaps Sylvia Plath. But Ashes in the Air by Ali Alizadeh was part of showing me that it’s just a matter of finding page poetry that you like, understand and can connect with.

I’m not exactly sure how you read a poetry book, let alone review. I suppose everyone is different. I basically read it cover to cover, perhaps like you’d read a prose novel, with a pause after each poem to think and breathe. I stopped at a few poems in particular, either to read them over because I was really moved by them or because a first reading was not sufficient and it took me a few more to gain full understanding, or at least enough to get something out of it. I think perhaps you read poetry books a few times and keep coming back to it. Or that’s how I intend to approach it.

But I think reading poetry collections in general can feel a little foreign, to even spoken word poets like myself. I was force fed a bit of poetry in school, but never really made it a habit, beyond being struck by Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ and ‘Meatworks by Robert Gray. They are two poems in particular that I remember as moving me. I was introduced to spoken word much later and found it accessible, much more than some of the poetry I read in various literary journals and so my opinion about the page and stage divide began to form in my head.

This is important for readers to see where I’m coming from with this review. I have often felt that page poetry requires an advanced education to gain full understanding, which is very much the opposite of something like slam, but Alizadeh’s collection Ashes in the Air really impressed with me with how accessible it felt to me, even though I had to read a couple a few times over. Is that how you read poetry? Is there a right way?

I bought the book after meeting Ali at the Emerging Writers’ Festival in May. In one of the ‘Embassy sessions,’ one of the issues that came up was about the poet’s persona and whether that was important. I feel like it is, and that meeting the poet in question helped to gain an understanding of his work. It’s just a matter of knowing some basic biographical details, perhaps how he speaks and the issues he’s concerned about outside of poetry that allow for this. Does it allow a poet to get to the heart of creating the imagery and poetics without having to labour over explaining details to put the poems in context?

His poetry deals with issues of travel, migration, coming from Iran and living in Australia. The poems that struck me the most were ‘Shut Up’ about an Iranian asylum seeker in detention (I’m always on the look-out for affecting poetry about refugees and asylum seekers in Australia) as well as ‘The Guns of Northcote’ which talks of gentrification and poverty in Melbourne.

Often the choice of how the lines are placed, and where there are line breaks are not obvious to me, with all page poetry, but in this case, it does not prevent me from that simple level of understanding and from there, the more subtle. The form does not force you to live or die in making sense of it, but it allows you to focus on the content of the poems, and the images, which to me seems the most important part. You can write nice sounding poetry, but if it fails to mean anything then it leaves the reader wanting. Alizadeh does not leave me wanting.

[Jesse Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a genuinely beautiful collection of poetry. From the streams of eloquent language to the dissonant yet harmonic emotions portrayed, Ashes in the Air is a brilliant realisation of suffering and longing. A constant theme throughout the poems is the idea that something is wrong, even though many don't recognise it to be so. The pain is because of the state of things but also in part because it seems like no one notices just how awful everything is. It's not often enough that someone critiques Australia for being the "land of opportunity" in a way that leaves colonisers no room to argue. Alizadeh manages to scrape together the spectrum of human emotion to form an image of what it means to find yourself in a world/society that tells you that you're worthless; it was bittersweet. I found myself looking up definitions for many words yet in spite of the verbosity, the language was warm and felt like having a casual conversation over coffee. Ashes in the Air has made it to the top of my list of poetry collections.






As usual, here are my favourite lines:



I have to be a magician to survive this transitory hell.

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He wants to return to writing, but anger blocks the passage of language from the heart to the page.

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The interminable Western obsession with what Woman wears/shouldn’t wear. ‘Woman’ herself reinvented, characterised by the appearance of body covered or not, modified or not, desirable or not.

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But shouldn’t dire masculinity include courage as well as cruelty, if I’m an adolescent trying to ride both parental love and inner strength? No wonder I’m pain personified.

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Our only sin, the temporary plunge due to woman’s nibbling on the forbidden fruit of equality. But we’re all post-feminists now and deify almighty women who look feminine and achieve like men.

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Chastity implied justice in a world corrupted by desire for anything other than the truth of equality.

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Was it the Real, void without name, without substance or even style? Sick of the aleatory vileness of it all, inside me sited in seclusion, still unknown hovers what I saw: world-infected spirit moved by suffering, nothingness of anything other than fidelity to a truth, ephemeral, innocent-like, drifting from the centre that never could hold, above all things falling apart.

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The Australian dream is the name given to the nightmare for commission housing residents war refugees, economically cleansed by well-behaved shock-troopers versed in legalese.

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I wanted to fight with you against them.

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Never underestimate the undesirability of my love.

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I recognised the void before me.

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Let’s say the terror of demonic punishments was all too real and I can show you the scars.

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We flew from the profane towards a paradise and earthly constellations, stirred by something like the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

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In love’s place all kinds of tragedy verge on atrocity.

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Why did I stray away towards the deep end? I knew I couldn’t swim.

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I’ve never told my father I’d sunk into the infinite emptiness of dying.

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Loneliness bit hard, I thought it was my end or something similar.

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Viscerality of my being affirms the tangibility of pain.

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Why do nerves register the disturbance in the makeshift terrain of memory?

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What if my desire to collate in my mind only the cruelties and not the banal actualities of survival?

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Reality can be unforgiving, too real even if skin forgets the thorns and scars are all in the mind.

[Deb Chapman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Up and down, some memorable turns of phrase but overall most too dense and obscure for me to embrace easily. Some rare English words I had to keep looking up. Good but a bit performative?

[Anastasiia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads more like a diary than a book of poetry

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful poetry!