Qissa Reviews: Poetry from mid-twentieth-century Iran

I had a really interesting conversation recently about the education system in the UK and how the constant dissection of poetry and the search for ‘meaning’ eliminates the joy of it for many young people. As students, we are not encouraged to discuss (or even consider) how a poem makes us feel. We are told this is what they were writing about, told to look for similes and allegories, told to annotate. And it has taken me a long time (longer than I’d care to admit for someone whose career has been largely in publishing) to come back to poetry, and appreciate it as an art form. 

It is that appreciation that I have brought to Forough Farrokhzad’s incredible Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season. Confusingly, the title of this collection which features poems from across Farrokhzad’s whole career, is also the title of the final collection that she published in 1974. Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season is included in its entirety in this... Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season. You see my confusion!  However, this collection also includes work from the three other collections she published in her lifetime and works to provide a fascinating overview of her writing.

Gray’s introduction gives a solid account of Farrokhzad’s short life (she died in a car accident at just 33 years old) and the context is really necessary to provide a deeper understanding of the poems. The poems are included chronologically from when they were published, though it is interesting that, while this delineation is made clear in the contents, it is not shown throughout the rest of the book. There are no section headings or page breaks to show where one collection ends and another begins. I wonder whether this would have disrupted the flow of the book, or whether it would have been interesting to see which poems were grouped together in the different collections while reading. 

We learn from Gray’s introduction that Farrokhzad wrote her first collection, Wall, when she was newly married and living with her husband and son in a small village. She felt trapped and isolated there and that really comes across in the first section. A lot of the poems are about sex (as they are throughout the whole collection) and she writes about it so perfectly, with desire and sexuality coming through in so many moments. The title poem from the collection, ‘Wall’, was particularly confident and defiant - another of her writing traits. She uses powerful images of nature throughout and this poem in particular made me want to stop, re-read, sit back and wallow for a moment in the world she had created with her words. 

‍Rebellion, the second collection covered in this book, was perhaps my favourite. The first two poems are so strong and speak of women’s power, while other highlights include ‘Return’, about the feeling of disappointment when returning somewhere and not being able to see the person from which that place brings back so many memories. This dashing of hope is shown perfectly in the symmetry between the first and last stanzas: 

At last the ribbon of road ended

I arrived covered with dust

My gaze rushed ahead of me

On my lips a warm “Hello”

…

At last the ribbon of road ended

I arrived covered with dust

The road didn’t lead the thirsty to the spring

My town was the grave of my desires

And speaking of ‘desires’, Farrokhzad’s writing is sexy! She was very ahead of her time in writing about sex and desire from a woman’s point of view and while there were many gorgeous phrases I could have picked out, this one from ‘From Far Away’ struck me for its simplicity: 

my thirst has scalded your body like fire

The third collection featured, Another Birth, is the most interesting section in terms of range. It conveys a sense of loneliness more than the previous collections - seasons are mentioned to show the passing of time and there’s definitely a sense of loss or melancholy. This collection is also perhaps the darkest. ‘Earthly Verses’ has a lot of violent imagery, and ‘Realizing’ is particularly grotesque:

In the crooked lines of the ceiling

I saw my own eyes

like a weighty tarantula 

withering in foam, in the yellow, in suffocation

Shudder! That being said, there are some poems that strike you with their beauty and simplicity - made even more striking from their contrast with the horror and darkness of the poems surrounding them. ‘Pair’ beautifully captures a moment of intimacy and the shared comfort and safety that such a moment can bring, while ‘The Sun Comes Out’ features one of my favourite quotes from the whole collection:

wrap me in the silk of your kisses

want me in the slow-paced nights

‘O Jeweled Land’ perhaps best sums up this collection in the way that it is able to balance the light and the dark to such great effect. It is very different in style from her other poems - it’s much more in-your-face and subversive, but it’s also typically Farrokhzad in its boldness and defiance. It is also hilarious and one of the highlights of the whole book.

The final section is the aforementioned Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season. This section seems to revert back to Farrokhzad’s childhood a lot, and I would be interested to know more about when and where she was writing this section and why it was bringing up these memories and feelings for her. I would have also loved to have had the notes from the end of the book instead included as footnotes throughout. They provided really interesting context that was somewhat lost as they weren’t paired with the particular poem that they were helping to illuminate.

After all this, I want to go back to my opening statement about reading poetry for poetry’s sake. Even with no context and no prior knowledge, this collection is a delight to read. Farrokhzad’s writing is so incredibly relatable for something that was written 50+ years ago and her use of language is so engaging. It is such a tragic shame that Farrokhzad died so young and deprived the world of more of her writing. But it does mean that, with this collection, we get to see her full progression and development as a writer, and can devour all her ideas and beautiful imagery in one sitting if we so desire. And that’s pretty special, I think. 

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Qissa’s top poems from this collection:

• ‘Pair’
• ‘O Jeweled Land’
• ‘Return’
• ‘Wall’
• ‘The Sun Comes out’