War of Words

Like many exiled writers from the contemporary Arab world (Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Syrian poet Adonis), an elusive homeland has always been on Sinan Antoon's mind. Antoon left Baghdad in 1991 after the first Gulf War to study in the U.S. Now an associate professor of Arab-Islamic culture at New York University, he returned to his bedeviled hometown for the first time in the spring of 2003, to co-direct the anguished documentary About Baghdad, following the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The Baghdad Blues is his latest homage to the country's traumatized capital, though this discomfiting collection of poems is much less political than the film. You won't find the expected vilification of fiends like Saddam and Chemical Ali. In a parenthetical note to "A Prisoner's Song," Antoon explains that the poem's title refers to POWs on both sides of the Iran-Iraq war. But besides this and one sardonic, flippant reference to U.N. resolutions in "A Prism; Wet With Wars" — the collection's puffed-up opener, which is swollen with images of "imminent wreckage" — there is no overt reference to politics and no bitter outcry against George W. Bush or Bush's father (five of the poems were written from 1989 to 1991). There is no assault on the current Iraqi administration either.

Instead, Antoon focuses mostly on the anonymous citizens who have been mauled by the dogs of war, and none more so than children. Dylan Thomas famously refused to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London. Antoon is the polar opposite, and the deaths he elegizes are not accidental; they are calculated murders. In the most haunting stanza of the collection, from "To an Iraqi Infant," he addresses a young victim: "Don't be afraid!/ We'll arrange your bones/ Which ever way you want/ And leave your skull/ Like a flower on top."

Antoon rarely mentions Iraq explicitly in the poems. Were it not for this slim volume's title — and a few references to the Euphrates and the Tigris — you'd hardly know that the poems in The Baghdad Blues were specifically about the ordeal of life in Iraq. Like Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic — whose Sarajevo Blues recounts the wracking of that city — Antoon finds that agony is agony regardless of your GPS coordinates.

But his book is not pure pain. Antoon also sings of love. In the beautiful "Phantasmagoria II," he writes: "Your lips/ Are a pink butterfly/ Flying/ From one word/ To another/ I run after them/ In gardens of silence." Again, there's no sign that our Romeo is roaming the streets of Baghdad. Instead, Antoon has turned the sick city into a mirror of the world at large, where desire and disaster are never far apart.