I shall come back
To say, ‘I’m drunk on the shade
Of the mulberries that overhang our glasses.’
I shall come back
To sing of those who drank with me.
And it is enough
To mourn my father’s house;
To mourn for us – who abandoned it

                       from ‘The Last Song’

Born in Baghdad in 1945, now living in London, Fawzi Karim is one of the most compelling voices of the exiled generation of Iraqi writers. In the first collection of his poetry to appear in English, his long sequence ‘Plague Lands’ 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, napthalene, damp straw mats’, are recalled with painful intensity. Karim’s defiant humanity, rejecting dogma and polemic, makes him a necessary poet for fractured times.

Working closely with the author, the poet Anthony Howell has created versions of ‘Plague Lands’ and a selection of Karim’s shorter poems. Notes on the poems, Elena Lappin’s introduction and an afterword by Marius Kociejowsky exploring Karim’s life, illuminate the context of the poetry.

Decidedly, Fawzi Karim is a poet for our times, with his strong yet beautiful voice, his indignation, his protests – and the haunting memories of certain lines that seem intended for all of us, but that few of us can hear in the endless tumult of what is still called ‘life’ - James Kirkup

Cover Painting: Fawzi Karim, The Swimmer. Reproduced by permission of the artist.