Taking Mesopotamia

by Jenny Lewis

Taking Mesopotamia was originally inspired by Jenny Lewis's search for her lost father - the young South Wales Borderer who fought in the ill-fated Mesopotamian campaign of World War I. Through reconstructed diary extracts, witness statements, formal poems and free verse, the book extends into a wider exploration of the recent Iraq wars. It also includes translations of a number of the poems into Arabic, and photographs taken by Lewis's father on campaign in 1916. Woven throughout the book is a strand inspired by The Epic of Gilgamesh, whose themes of hubris, abuse of power and fear of death show us how little the world has changed in four thousand years.

Genres: Poetry, History

105 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Jenny Lewis is an Anglo-Welsh poet, playwright, songwriter, children’s author and translator who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She trained as a painter at the Ruskin School of Art before reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has worked as an advertising copywriter and a government press officer for, among others, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. She has also written children’s books and plays and co-written, with its creator, Kate Canning, a twenty-six-part children’s TV animation series, James the Cat. Her first poetry sequence, When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996) was broadcast on BBC Woman’s Hour, translated into Russian (Bilingua, 2002) and made into an opera with music by Gennadyi Shizoglazov which had its world premiere with the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company in Perm, Russia, November 2017. Since 2012, Jenny has been working with the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh on an award-winning Arts Council-funded project, ‘Writing Mesopotamia’, which aims to build bridges and foster friendships between English and Arabic-speaking communities. Her work for the theatre includes Map of Stars (2002), Garden of the Senses (2005), After Gilgamesh (2011) and, with Yasmin Sidhwa and Adnan al-Sayegh, Stories for Survival: a Re-telling of the 1001, Arabian Nights (2015). She has published two collections with Oxford Poets/Carcanet, Fathom (2007) and Taking Mesopotamia (2014). Jenny is currently completing a PhD on Gilgamesh at Goldsmiths.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lewis’s father was a World War I second lieutenant in the Mesopotamian campaign of 1916. Inspired by his diaries and photographs (that’s one on the cover, and there’s also a section of them in the book), she wrote these poems reflecting on conflict in Iraq then and now. Often a poem arising from her father’s experience will face one based on an interview or newspaper report from the 2000s. The Middle Eastern myths of Eden and Gilgamesh are also a frequent source of metaphors or direct quotations. I was impressed by how Lewis brought all these different strands together; they make for a good mix of literary vs. lowbrow, cultivated vs. conversational. “The call-up,” in memory of Wilfred Owen, and “Y,” which is indeed shaped as a capital letter y on the page, are particularly beautiful.

Some favorite lines:

“life / here seems arbitrary and cheap. Each time you wake, / touch wood and pray you’ll be one of the lucky ones.” (from “June 1916”)

“Here we are stuck in the desert while their lives / keep on almost as usual there in dear old Wales / except it’s now a place where there are no young / men and people tell each other no news is good news.” (from “October 1916”)

“what wound into the canals was music, snaking / into the wounds of war, the desert’s music / of water, irrigating and cleansing … sounds of life trying / to go on as long as water continues to flow” (from “Epilogue”)

[Claire Williamson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving across voices and time, the poet captures a story that is at once deeply personal (seeking a father in words, images and other WW1 accounts), contemporary (near present experiences of Iraq and conflict) and mythical (Gilgamesh). There are other poems too that make links to roots in Wales and the bigger questions around displacement and war.

As a reader, it would be easy to feel disorientated in such an undertaking, but this was not my experience. What I felt was the yearning of each voice and the enchantment of words. The Welsh Horse, for example, is mesmerising in its form and content. It exemplifies the rest of the text in some ways, as it moves across time and space, a witness and a participant.

I felt the resonance of the writing journey and it reinforced a belief I have about poetry engendering geographical journeys, meetings and pilgrimages.

I felt the aliveness of the topics covered (past and present) and how gently the author brought difficult truths forward, which seemed to me to be the most subtle skill of the collection, collapsing time.

There were many overlaps with the MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes in its capacity and particularly the way other people's accounts in poetry or prose poems are managed.

[Gloria · Rating 3 out of 5]

An insightful collection of poetry and prose.
Poignant memories, echoes from the past - resonating in the present.

With only 94 pages this 'little book, with emotive clout' can be read in one sitting - however can only be truly digested/embraced through revisitation.


My thanks go to Goodreads - 'first reads' and Carcanet Press/Oxford Poets, for providing me with a copy of this book.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think I can appreciate the poetry within this book. I do however thank the author for an insight into the parallels of ww1 and The Gulf wars of recent times. It does well as a mixture of history, personal recollections and commentary via poetry.
The tragedy of the events and the embroilment of ordinary folk within them are clearly and poetically expounded.

[Douglas Adamson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful, and as always with Jenny Lewis, a thought-provoking, sensitive book of prose, poetry, interviews and pictures. Jenny's loving search for her late father during his time serving in WW1 Mesopotamia and the contextualisation of modern day war in Iraq make this an evocative and timeless account of the helpless stupidity of conflict. Beautifully crafted and evoked.

[Salli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I too am researching an unknown relative, but mine is from the second world war, I had expected some fellow feeling. Maybe I need a second read but I'm left a little lost. The personal testimony was moving but somehow I'm aware of better and stronger. I don't really get free verse poetry. I'm not asking for rhymes just a bit of metaphor or assonance or reference. Sometimes I didn't realise I had read verse, I was thinking I was still on personal testimony. I think I ended up not sure what the objective was, which might have been because of what I brought to it. I liked the introduction to the stories/poems of Gilgamesh but it just did not gel for me