Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Persian by Kazim Ali with Mohammad Jafar Mahallati. "There's modernism & then there's modernism—depending on where you are. Sohrab Sepehri was in Iran, a modernist Muslim for whom the black stone of the Kaaba was the sunlight in the flowers. He tried to invent a world in poetry and a poetry in the world as had not been seen, oh, maybe since the Nishapur of Omar Khayyam. He made it new, indeed—writing a poetry that is a geometry of breath from which music grows, with its cargo of light. And it took someone of Kazim Ali's lyrical powers to 'English' Sepehri so that we can hear him today, loud and clear"—Pierre Joris.

Author City: TEHRAN IRN

Sohrab Sepehri was born in 1928 on a journey between Kashan, his family's home, and Qum. An acclaimed painter, Sepehri published eight books of poetry during his lifetime and traveled widely throughout the world, including Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, China and Japan, the United States and South America. Many of his poems were influenced by his relationship with nature, and his studies of Eastern philosophy and visual arts and were often composed in a cadence similar to spoken language, considered a radical innovation at the time. Sepehri died in 1980 and in Iran is considered to be one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.

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