Customer Reviews

Love/Iraq

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Love/Iraq explores both the real and conceptual worlds of heaven and hell on earth as they melt and fuse and eddy and oscillate into and around each other. Poignant memories of love from first flush to full depth haunt a woman's struggle to not be made insane by its violent loss: "It is the tenth day of the war. How long you have been missing. I want to tell you why I still play with my addictions like a person striking matches, burning them out."

It begins with a rich evocation of Baghdad and flashes between that cruel desert reality, where "the tar of the road melts under your wheels," to a celebration of Paris, where sight/smell/sound/Hemingway/Montmartre are rendered with the soft and yet intense focus of impressionistic paintings. Its love story is as bittersweet as Casablanca's, with all the limbo of that stop-over world where vulnerable human beings fend off madness while they wait, and wait, and wait: "Where the desolate pinball machines still, I believe, stand, the round balls like impossibly dense planets striking fire, striking the sound of your coldness."

Sheila Black's poems are heavy and yet porous, racing toward transcendence and then slowing down to whisper a telling detail: "I knew the supermarket air could smell like the inside of plastic." Love/Iraq magically reflects the struggle of anyone who has loved deeply and sought to honor that love in the difficult work of grief. In the best times this book will enrich your awareness of that experience. In the worst times it will help you to survive it.

The poet Tony Hoagland has written that Sheila Black's poems are "hypnotic." That is, finally, the best way to describe them.

Sheila Black manages to combine her lyrical voice and romantic vision with the ugliness of war in a way that is absolutely compelling and horrendous all at the same time. I find myself wanting alternately to cry or vomit. Which may not sound like praise, but it is. The poetry is stunning. The parallels between disparate lovers and disparate cultures are thought-provoking at the least. Be prepared to change the way you think. I highly recommend this book.