I’ve written before, here, about the debt I owe to Sarah Maguire, for the inspiration her poetry gave me to pick up my own pencil again. Moreover, she remains one of my favourite poets – possibly my very favourite contemporary poet despite the curtailing of her career by her tragic early death. Her lyrical, economical style was suited perfectly to her big themes: her adoption; London life; gender inequality; sex; flowers, gardening and, by extension, ecological catastrophe; migration; and the injustices suffered by the Palestinians and other peoples across the Arab lands.

The Pomegranates of Kandahar, her final (Chatto & Windus, 2007) collection, contained all those themes and more, with, as its title implies, a larger focus on the last of them. If any one poem in the collection stands out it is ‘From Dublin to Ramallah’, dedicated and directly addressed to the Palestinian poet and novelist, Ghassan Zaqtan, a small selection of whose poems, translated into English by Fady Joudah, is available here. The first of the 15 rolling, irregular quatrains in Maguire’s poem opens with the message that she is writing a (poetic) postcard to him because he had been denied a visa to travel to Ireland, presumably to attend the Dublin Book Festival:

Because they would not let you ford the River Jordan
and travel here to Dublin, I stop this postcard in its tracks –
before it reaches your sealed-up letterbox, before yet another checkpoint,
before the next interrogation even begins.

What purpose does the anaphora of ‘before’ serve here? Primarily to underline the oppression suffered by Zaqtan and his compatriots, but also to reinforce the comparative liberty which we in the UK, Ireland and other countries take for granted?

That Maguire is writing from Ireland – and from ‘the underwater backroom / of Bewley’s Oriental Café’ on Grafton Street at that – has two other significances: that it is the home country of her adoptive and blood relatives; and because of an unstated historical parallel between the situation of the Irish and Palestinian peoples, both subject to violent subjugation and colonisation.

The Orientalist setting of Bewley’s and its Far- and faux Middle-Eastern fare, provides another curious parallel of sorts, carefully and precisely observed by Maguire:

I ship you the smoked astringency of Formosa Lapsang Souchong
and a bun with a tunnel of sweet almond paste
set out on a chipped pink marble-topped table
from the berth of a high-backed red-plush settle.

The delicate, yet pointed beauty of that ‘smoked astringency’ is remarkable: ‘smoked’ with its connotation, maybe, of burnings-out; and ‘astringency’ with its multiple meanings, including bitterness, and curious etymology; and its apparent conflation of ‘stringent agency’ – an agency stringent in its suppression of individual and collective freedoms. The choice of a tea from Formosa, i.e. Taiwan, an island nation under perpetual threat of invasion by its much more powerful neighbour can’t be coincidental.

Outside the Liffey and the city itself are being inundated, such that ‘the cream double-decker buses steam up and stink // of wet coats and wet shopping’. From here, the complexity of Maguire’s concerns, ‘Closer to home and to exile’, become further entwined with Zaqtan’s plight, by blurring geographies in language which feels far from typically English:

I ask for a liquid dissolution:
let borders dissolve, let words dissolve,

let English absorb the fluency of Arabic, with ease,
let us speak in wet tongues.
Look, the Liffey is full of itself. So I post it
to Ramallah, to meet up with the Jordan,

as the Irish Sea swells into the Mediterranean,
letting the Liffey
dive down beneath bedrock
swelling the limestone aquifer from Hebron to Jenin,

plumping each cool porous cell with good Irish rain.
If you answer the phone, the sea at Killiney
will sound throughout Palestine.
If you put your head out the window (avoiding the snipers please)

a cloud will rain rain from the Liffey
and drench all Ramallah, drowning the curfew.

There is a measured but desperate urgency here, enhanced by the rolling rhythm, repetitions, musicality (all those ‘l’s) and acute line-breaks.

In Beyond the Lyric (Chatto & Windus, 2012), her brilliant, though at times (understandably) eccentric ‘map of contemporary British poetry’, Fiona Sampson a little bafflingly lumped Maguire with Gillian Clarke and Michael Longley as what she called ‘touchstone lyricists’. Sampson perceptively noted, on page 87, that this poem,

is almost cavalier in it refusal to sound ‘crafted’: ‘rain rain’? Could Maguire really find no synonym for this kind of weather? Of course she could. The micro-pause that the repetition introduces allows us to glimpse the ghost of a half-line break, which moves throughout this poem – a trace of the parallelism of some Arabic verse. The pattern is broken only by that disobedient ‘throughout’ unfolding its long vowels in a deft piece of mimesis.

It’s a pity, perhaps, that Sampson didn’t pursue that ‘trace’. And her last observation seems a bit of a stretch – no pun intended – to my eyes and ears – I get what she means; albeit that there is so much to the poem which Sampson could have glossed.

Zaqtan, still in Ramallah, in the West Bank, remains on X/Twitter, here; his latest post, yesterday, loosely translates as:

I was born in the homes of Christians in Beit Jala
In the stone houses above the olive presses
Where heavy stones roll in the fall
Where Arab women draw the sign of the cross whenever oil flows into the gutter
Born among women
In the course of hymns, when Sunday had the smell of tea and mint
On the balconies of Muslim women.