My Tranquil War and Other Poems

By Anis Shivani

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Description: Composed over the last decade, *My Tranquil War and Other Poems* tackles head-on the response of the poet in a time of great political turmoil. What is the poet’s special responsibility? When terror becomes a general condition of dread, internalized to the last degree, even beauty and truth assume grotesque masks. The poet surveys the breakage of culture, occurring both retrospectively and in the present, and is left speechless—and potentially harmless. No one is exempt from the brutality, there are no excuses. The danger for poetry in such times is that it can become slave to technique and self-worship, in love with its own grandiosity. Thus these poems, written in a remarkable variety of forms—from traditional sonnets to experiments in found poetry—constantly rub up against self-limitation, and in that effort alone, the desire to discover a voice appropriate for the times, turn what could have been relentless elegy into an often transcendent sphere of holiness and refuge. There are, after all, beauty and truth, in the expected places; to plunge after them, one only needs all the arsenal of past culture, although the baggage may well be disposable and contingent. The poet's fate, it turns out, is a central determinant, a surefire clue to the future, as empire relentlessly falls apart, past illusions shatter, dreams fail to suffice, and a new humanity emerges, almost against its will. The fiery apocalypse of the soul, negated at its core, at a time when the public and the private merge like inseparable warring twins, is what *My Tranquil War and Other Poems* tries to capture, in poetry carefully treading the fault lines of sacredness, when nothing is labeled as such.