My Country's Hair Turned White by Dilawar Karadaghi, ed. and trans. by Jiyar Homer and trans. by Mike Baynham women poets ‘Utting animates life’s brittle edges

‘Utting animates life’s brittle edges and her poems carry unforced emotional weight

Among these stretches of foreboding are moments of calm

and the irreconcilable rifts – between lover and beloved

reminiscences and contemporary news items to piece together the lives and inner worlds of various relatives…her lively narrative poems are interspersed with extracts from her original sources

all from Shearsman

My Country's Hair Turned White by Dilawar Karadaghi, ed. and trans. by Jiyar Homer and trans. by Mike Baynham women poets ‘Utting animates life’s brittle edgesDilawar Karadaghi is one of the most important contemporary Kurdish poets and his work is marked by the long years of persecution, marginalization and struggle that are part of the Kurdish experience. The poems in this short selection are full of longing, sadness, loss and, in the final poem, anger, as the poet remembers the devastating chemical attack on Halabja in 1988 in which his countrys hair turned white.