Remnants of War, Migration, Love is available to purchase from €13
Author: Taha Salim | Introduction by Jacob Warn | Published November 2024
Introduction
Poetry, I have always felt, is a process of distillation. The poet works with raw emotions, experiences and thoughts through an alchemical process to create poetry. And so it is in Remnants of War, Migration, Love. This augural collection of poems by Taha Salim composed over seven years turns three decades of life into 43 perfectly distilled poems.
These poems take the reader on a journey. We begin with fierce war, a set of poems in which the poet invites us to familiarise ourselves with the inanity of violence, the mask that is masculinity, and the painful, monotonous day-to-day struggle of life lived under constant war. But make no mistake, this is no history of war understood as a game of politics played out on foreign soils, this is a deeply personal encounter, where the fall-out from bombs in the external world more often than not takes us on an inwards, introspective journey into the heart and mind.
Though remnants of war remain with us, in the second set of poems, we then join the poet ‘wandering this earth from shelter to shelter’. In these poems, we are invited to confront the tension between nostalgia for one’s past and the promise of a new future. It is a journey that the poet both undertakes and is forced upon him. He is both agent and victim. It is a process of fond remembering and forceful forgetting, of discovery and loss, departure and arrival. In these poems, we find ourselves moving between refugee camps where the poet evokes suffering, tenderness and even humour, to the poet’s mind as he reckons with his own emotional odyssey in an unfamiliar and changing world.
Like sunlight breaking through on a cloudy day, the collection culminates in love. These poems are prayers to something more eternal and powerful than the themes of sorrow and loss that come before. Love is not what awaits after war and migration, but what is there all along: in the relationship between son and mother, in one’s communion with the sky, in an anonymous couple married in a refugee camp. These timeless poems are full of flourishing hope, cinematic encounters and intense feelings. Indeed, this intensity – present in both the actual poetic scenes and in how we read them – owes itself to the journey we have been on. We reach these poems with a greater sense of appreciation and relief. We have come from difficulty to a place of peace. We have arrived.
If poetry is distillation, then its goal should be clarity. Yet this is often not the case and as readers of poetry, we are often left feeling like we have not fully understood. Thankfully, Taha’s poetry is nothing of this sort. His poems are clear, conversational and vivid. These are poems that are written from the heart, invocations to be read, re-read and shared aloud. Remnants of War, Migration, Love is a remarkably honest and important first book of poetry from Taha Salim.
Find out more and buy the book: https://tahasalim.com
