The Wrong Person to Ask
Tracing movement from Iran through youth in America to a present life in Scotland, this debut collection follows the feeling of migration and belonging. It asks what home means, and what we carry with us as we leave one place for another.
作品情報
It traces a history of movement while asking how a home is lost, carried, and made again.
This sequence of poems moves from a childhood in Iran torn apart by revolution to youth in America and a present life in Scotland, illuminating the idea of home from several angles. The voice carries pain, yet keeps a quiet power that reconnects place and memory.
書籍情報
- 出版社
- Bloodaxe Books
- 発売日
- 2023-12-05
- ページ数
- 80ページ
- 言語
- 英語
- サイズ
- 15.88 x 1.27 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781780376394
- ISBN-10
- 1780376391
- 価格
- 2862 JPY
- カテゴリ
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/British
Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest. Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize.
Marjorie Lotfi was born in New Orleans, moved to Tehran as a baby with her American mother and Persian father, and fled Iran with one suitcase and an hour's notice during the Iranian Revolution. After waiting with family for her father's return in her mother's tiny hometown in Ohio, she lived in different parts of the US before moving to New York as a young lawyer in 1996 and then back and forth to the UK, settling in the UK in 1999, and in Scotland in 2005. Her pamphlet Refuge , poems about her childhood in revolutionary Iran, was published by Tapsalteerie Press in 2018. She has been the Poet in Residence at Jupiter Artland, Spring Fling and the Wigtown Book Festival, and was commissioned to write Pilgrim , a sequence about migration between Iran and the US, for the St Magnus Festival in Orkney. She was one of the three winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021, and her first book-length collection, The Wrong Person to Ask , is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023.
レビュー
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Tender, powerful and important poetry
‘Ask me for the measure of rose water…’ Lotfi’s poems explore home and exile - a witness to history, and the place of her family in that. Love shines on every page. These are wonderfully crafted poems with nothing overblown. A tender and clear-eyed look at what has to be left behind and what can be found in the present. ‘And what is home if not the choice - over and over again - to stay?’
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Interesting but unchallenging as verse.
I think this would have been better as a prose account. As poetry, this doesn't go far enough beyond the descriptive, for me. A fascinating autobiographical book is in amongst it though. Lotfi has good diction too. She just wish she'd give them a final push.
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A superbly crafted heart-warming journey through the author’s lived experience.
I find myself returning to this collection. The poet takes us with her and her family across time and cultures. It’s full of humanity and a loving respect for her Iranian roots. A real gem- the pomegranate seeds shining on the salad!
関連する文学賞
- Forward Prizes for Poetry 第33回（2024年） ・Excellence Award