Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Carcanet Press, 2011
Language: English

Plague Lands and Other Poems is the first collection of Fawzi Karim’s poetry to appear in English. The long sequence ‘Plague Land’ is an elegy for the life of a lost city, a chronicle of a journey into exile, haunted by the deep history of an ancient civilisation. Memories of Baghdad’s smoke-filled cafés, its alleys and mulberry-shaded squares, ‘the tang of tea, of coffee beans…arak, naphthalene, damp straw mats’, are recalled with painful intensity. Rejecting dogma and polemic, Karim’s defiant humanity makes him a necessary poet for fractured times.

Versions by Anthony Howell after translations by Abbas Kadhim.

Fawzi Karim (1945-2019) was a well-known Iraqi poet, writer and painter. Born in Baghdad in 1945, he was educated at Baghdad University before embarking on a career as a freelance writer. He lived in Lebanon from 1969-1972 and has lived in London since 1978. The Ivory Tower, his column on poetry and European classical music has appeared in a number of influential Arabic newspapers and is respected for its emphasis on the transcendent value of art and culture. He has published more than twenty three books of poetry, including a two volume Collected Poems (2000), The Foundling Years (2003), The Last Gypsies (2005), Night of Abel Alaa (2008), The Empty Quarter (2014) and What The poetry is, but a Slip of The Tongue (2016). He is also the author of sixteen books of prose, including The Emperor’s Clothes: On Poetry (2000), Diary of The End of a Nightmare (2005), Gods the Companion, on music (2009), Pastures of Cactus, short stories (2015). The Music and Poetry (2014), The Music and Painting (2014) and a novel Who is Afraid of The Copper City (2016).