Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems

by Nazifa Islam

“To write these poems, I select a paragraph from a Woolf novel—The Waves or Mrs. Dalloway—and only use the words from that paragraph to create a poem. I essentially write poems while doing a word search using Virginia Woolf as source material. I don’t allow myself to repeat words, add words, or edit the language for tense or any other consideration. These poems are simultaneously defined by both Woolf’s choices with language as well as my own. They feel like an homage to this writer I so admire as well as a way of authentically expressing my lived experience.” —Nazifa Islam

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2021

About the author

Nazifa Islam is the author of the poetry collections Searching for a Pulse (Whitepoint Press, 2013) and Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems (Shearsman Books, 2021). Her fiction, paintings, and poems have appeared in publications including Waxwing, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Account, Gulf Coast, RHINO, The Rumpus, and Beloit Poetry Journal; and her work has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry anthology series and The Wigleaf Top 50.

She has long been fascinated by literature that is preoccupied with mental illness and the existential. Writers she admires, identifies with, and who are perpetually influencing her work include Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. She attempts to dissect, examine, and explore the bipolar experience through her writing. She is currently working on a series of L.M. Montgomery found poems.

Nazifa earned her BA in English at the University of Michigan and her MFA at Oregon State University. She lives in Novi, Michigan.

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erasures have been much in the talk these last few years. In them, the poet finds her poem by eliminating the words of the original writer (or rather the creator of the text) that get in the way. It's a kind of sculpting, finding the art inside the stone. The constraints of erasure seem to me to be as restrictive, if not quite as rigorous, as the constraints of, say, a sonnet. And the results are occasionally as beautiful.

Found Poems are different. Usually the poet finds the poem in an existing text or series of texts. When the author puts the words together in a new place, or a new way, and calls it a poem, they change. The context changes the words radically and makes them part of a poem.

Nazifa Islam, using the two novels by Virginia Woolf ("The Waves" and "Mrs. Dalloway") has done something different. She describes it: "I used only the words from individual paragraphs of Virginia Woolf novels to write each of these poems. I did not allow myself to repeat words, add words, or edit the language in each paragraph or any other consideration." But what is worth underlining is that she has usually taken individual words, just occasionally short phrases, and used them to meet the demands of her own poems. Yes, she is restricted to the words that Woolf has chosen, so there is inevitably a feeling of the pensive lyricism that pervades Woolf's work.

But that pensive lyricism is clearly conducive to Nazifa Islam's own imagination. This is a sad, even a despairing book, with a few glimmers of the possibilities of joy. Behind the poems, it sometimes feels as if there is a narrative of love and loss, but the details of that narrative are never explicit. Out of the diction found in Woolf and her own imaginative reworking of personal loss and its resulting despair, Nazifa Islam has made some powerful poems.

The constraints she has chosen sometimes, inevitably, must lead her to occasional strained language, but that is almost always redeemed by the lines around it. Here's one of the shorter poems, "The Bird in My Heart Was Frightened":

I ran like thrown light over the fixed earth
my legs quivering, mu heart moving faster and faster.
I ran over pink geraniums. I saw green leaves
ripple on a still branch. I dashed past
the nest in the hedge with its dead bird and mould.
I cried and went on running.
I thought of nothing but moving, moving.

Now, to my ear, "quivering" and "dashed" don't seem quite right, maybe just a touch too loud? But the "fixed earth," those geraniums and the leaves on the "still" branch," the "dead bird and mould" and that repetition at the end -- are powerful, evocative. The internal rhymes and half-rhymes create a music that carries the reader (this reader, anyway) through the poem.

This book contains a clear picture of an emotion, in this case--anguish, and does so using a new and very interesting form well suited to the subject.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forlorn Light is such an emotional collection. These poems transform you from being just a reader, into the subject of each poem. I felt the misery, anguish, despair, joy, and love. With Forlorn Light, you get absorbed into it and become its protagonist.  

This book is written and organized in such a way that each poem can be read on its own and hold its own ground. Yet, when the poems are read consecutively, it reads as an emotional journey of a character(s) that ebbs and flows as do the emotions/feelings in all of us.  

My favorite from the collection is Everything is Clear. It's such a powerful and positive message. It's placement in the book is extremely clever as it's almost directly in the middle of the book. Many of the poems before and after it talk about despair, loneliness, and sadness. Yet, in the middle of all these sad emotions there is a ray of sunshine, of hope, that penetrates through it all and pushes you to see yourself as the beautiful person you are and that you have been "...summoned to triumph." For me, the message is while you might feel surrounded by negativity or sadness, we need to remember how worthy we are to be valued and how capable we all are to "triumph".  

If you enjoy poetry or just great writing, this book is for you.

[Alexander Dunford | Writer | Artist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nazifa Islam is your once in a generation poet. It’s no easy task to re-map the words of the great Virginia Woolf. Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems must have been both a challenge and reward to write. I think it’s quite clear Woolf and Islam share kindred souls. Their works deserve to rest side-by-side, forever conversing with one another, sharing the same shelf for generations. Islam’s book is their wedding—poetically speaking (pun intended). Forlorn Light is worth your time to read.

I warn you: read Nazifa Islam and you will be changed. Islam writes with phenomenal prowess about undressing and accessing the naked truth of the bipolar experience. Several poems left me exposed and shivering, as if I were in front of a mirror which reflected what’s inside the reader. The images I discovered moved me to tears. And, the more I studied, the more I understood myself. I know I will never be the same.

Read this book or miss out on something great.

Happy Reading,

—W. Alexander
www.w-alexander.com

[Zara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nazifa Islam has a way of viseralizing grief and death and beauty that is incredible. In Virginia Woolf’s works, Nazifa finds and stitches together words to create new and resonate meaning. Her writing draws out the reader’s own feelings of love, longing, loss, and grief — all those emotions that the writer seems to be evoking that live in the threadbare and thinning membrane between life and death.

Lines like “death looked at her | and purred” and “I sit alone between the beech tree | and wrap my matted hair in brambles” and “soon I will be a slip of history | a shadow of the past | myself — my life — unwritten” bring the reader into the poet’s oscillation and coexistence with the pain and potential meaningless of life and mortality and the ornate beauty and preciousness of life (and death’s) imagery and small moments. (In my reading of the poems, anyway.)

Really enjoyed this work and highly recommend this poet and her past work as well (Searching for a Pulse.) Hope folks will give her a read.

[Emma Filtness · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love found poems and it's great to see more presses publishing whole collections of them lately, such as Sloat's erasure project Hotel Almighty and this gem, too. Forlorn Light is great example of why a sequence of found poems works, as you can really see how the poet picks up threads of language throughout from the source texts. I also found it really interesting that the book contains an explanation of Islam's creative process in making the poems, with an example. These cut-ups/excepted and remixed poems from Woolf novels are so well-crafted and an utter pleasure to read, and I love the constraint of the paragraph employed by the poet.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I'd posted my review of this lovely collection already but it appears I did not. You can read it here:

https://www.usi.edu/sir/amie-whittemo...

[Michael Chin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nazifa Islam is truly a master of the found poem form.