These poems by Kazim Ali are gorgeous, each phrase a breath of prayer, the words presented as humbling offerings, each one a deep bow.
Kazim Ali’s speaker in The Fortieth Day is a liar, full of contradiction, but what else can words do but lie? Even if we poets want to put our faith in them, we find they come up short again and again. Ali’s speaker acknowledges his own lack of faith in words in “The Year in Winter” when he says: “How is it possible I ceased to believe in tongues.”
Still, one can’t fail to acknowledge that Ali is as skilled as one can hope to be using these broken tools. The poems are brilliant pieces that spill (spell) the bricks of the Tower of Babel onto the pages of the volume, falling into place as a map to God, defying the stubborn notion humans hold onto that there is a singular direct, skyward route to God. Ali finds a way to cobble together the limited devices of words, sounds and rhythms like birds build homes by twining together strands of hair and flimsy grass. Ali brings us closer to God by netting together varied pieces of this speaker’s life. What arises in the work is a sense of a Presence, but one defined by its “Lostness.” It is in this sense of an inability to locate God (“You’re unlocatable” in “August”) that Ali’s speaker, and his sympathetic readers, garner as much comfort as one can hope for in “a world contracted to expire” (“Interrupted Letter”). “Lostness” is the volume’s first poem and it speaks of the comfort in this truth: “how could I live without You if I were ever given answers.”
Though the poems as a whole insist on a non-vertical approach to God, even Ali’s speaker at times is confounded by this truth. In “Chasm,” he writes,
Why do you not colossus me
how is it you Babylon meBabel me, sun whisper
and steeple me
In “Rope,” the comfort comes directly from above: “Each strand of his father’s voice a shaft of light from Heaven/A rope thrown down to rescue him/He wants to grab hold, disappear.”
The volume takes its title, The Fortieth Day, from the Islamic tradition of holding a second funeral forty days after death, which is when “we return to watch the soul/take reluctant leave of the body” (“Night Prayer”). Those who might crave a narrative strand in the volume might want to guess whose funeral this is, who the “disappeared friend” is in “A Century in the Garden.”
Some readers, like the friend who pleadingly asked over dinner the other night, “When will language poetry go out of fashion?” may have less patience with these poems that mean on many different levels. Though this volume wouldn’t be categorized as language poetry, it borrows elements of that tradition such as continually unfolding meaning systems. The buried in “Second Funeral” could be a family member—perhaps the speaker’s father, or a friend, or the second major human loss the speaker has experienced.
However, there are many references in the volume to a part of the self being lost or buried as well as God being lost. The final poem “Four O’clock” speaks of a perpetual state of lostness through a narrative about “an old man with a box of chocolates, lost on the sidewalk” who’s missed by his granddaughter at four o’clock. The poem’s penultimate line states, “It’s a minute before four.” But those impatient with the kind of archaeology required to dig out the layers of meanings present here will miss out on a poet and a poetry rich with sounds and meaning, eerily musical, and full of truth.
However, if one craves narrative, a reader might look to the funeral of the book’s title and guess that the speaker’s own reaching toward God is a response to an actual loss of a “dear disappeared” (“Dear Sunset, Dear Avalanche”). We might consider that the speaker is reconciling the idea of death by practicing how it might feel to die. “How are you supposed to remember where you live /in a world contracted to expire” (“Interrupted Letter”) is a question the poems turn over again and again. The speaker continually understands loss by becoming lost.
Ali uses words, sound and rhythms to feel through this loss, even if he knows the tools being used are limited. He finds a way through these allusive, lyric poems, to chart new constellations that will give us a map of the universe. But first, we have to acknowledge that the old maps are useless: “the vast sky/disowned from his constellation” (“Ursa Major”). The new path is marked by repeating themes, sounds, and images and each of these functions as a kind of “lantern” (“Morning Prayer”) lighting our way as God might (“should You light the way/or should You hold me” from “Dear Lantern, Dear Cup”), though “light is blinding and physics fibs” (“Evening Prayer”). As many of the phrases are sound-generated, we can’t discount the repetition of “spill” and “spell” throughout the volume and fail to make a connection between the two. Thus spelling out words is a kind of spilling, which is a mark of Ali’s humility, a suggestion that the poems happened by accident. Music also makes a continued appearance in this volume, in poems such as “Double Reed” and in the hauntingly lovely dream piece, “The Ocean Floor.” Water also returns again and again, in many different forms.
These poems span distance, reaching from the ocean’s floor to heaven. They bridge time, from antiquity to this very minute. The subject matter also covers a vast range, from everyday tasks like “Doing laundry” (“Afternoon Prayer”), the current ongoing war, seasons, astronomy, and a divided self—as in “Math”: “Who is that in the space your/self and your self do not meet?” Family, heritage, the danger of faith and the rhythms of a day marked by regular prayer are also honored. In all these pieces, though, there is a reaching for a sense of God. So God is spilt throughout the pages of this book—in the everyday, in the sacred, in the light coming through the window:
God in the sky and God in the water
dissolving at the horizon,or God in the air and in the plant condensing
These poems by Kazim Ali are gorgeous, each phrase a breath of prayer, the words presented as humbling offerings, each one a deep bow. Even if “the lyre is a liar” (“Rope”), there’s still incredible music being made.
