Book Review :: Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960 to 2023

Review by Jami Macarty

In the expanded edition of Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960 to 2023, Mojdeh Bahar has selected and translated the poetry by one hundred and four Persian women poets born after September 1941. The bilingual Persian and English anthology features poems that have not previously appeared in a book and include classical Persian poetic forms such as ghazals, do-beti (couplets), and robai’i (quatrains), though most of the poems have been written in free verse’s open form.

Here, an arresting quatrain by Fariba Arabnia:

“I am fine.
Just like a farm
Its crops razed by locusts
No longer worried about sickles.”

An ethos of connection characterizes the spirit of the anthology. The poets connect to their feelings, to contemporary women poets from Iran and the Iranian diaspora, to the Persian literary tradition, and to literary and social themes through the triumvirate lens of history, ideology, and geography.

These women poets, “citizen[s] of the state of wandering” (Nahid Bagheri Goldschmeid), have traveled “inconsolable borders” (Pegah Ahmadi) with “bloody hands / in their pockets” (Shabnam Azar) and the “scent of petroleum” (Roja Chamankar) in the air, have “survived many storms” (Mana Aghaee) to claim their dignity, imploring “Let me be a woman” (Razieh Bahrami Khoshnood).

Here, a candid excerpt from Mahshid Naghashpour:

“Women strive
for equality with men
What a futile and ill-defined effort
Equality with men who have caused chaos
and war in the world!
And who hold the detonator in their hand
It can’t go on like this
We must think of something!
Maybe it would be better for men to strive
for equality with women”

Writing against oppression, censorship, and exile, and “with dream / Hope / Anticipation” (Niki Firoozkoohi), these women poets take refuge in language, “writing… in order to live” (Maryam Jafari Azarmani).

Poem by poem, Song of the Ground Jay introduces Anglophones to the “vertigoes” of Persian women poets’ fierce hearts beyond the borders of their “shackled” lives. Like the Iranian Ground Jay (Podoces pleskei), the anthology’s sand-colored, black-throated mascot, adapts to dry habitats so too have Persian women poets adapted to their “battle with words” (Sanaz Zaresani). Despite “the lump in a throat” (Neda Abkari) the “razor-sharp tongue[s]” of these poems “shine” and offer readers trilling cries and melodic notes as they “kill with poetry” (Zahra Zaman)!

Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960 to 2023 selected and translated by Mojdeh Bahar. Gordyeh Press, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.