Steve Van-Hagen
reviews
by
Omar Sabbagh
Omar
Sabbagh, the widely published Lebanese-British poet whose debut collection My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint appeared in
September 2010, has followed up his debut with a delicate, thoughtful, often
moving semi-autobiographical second collection, The Square Root of Beirut. It begins with two epigraphs, the first
from Henry Miller and the second from G. K. Chesterton. The Miller quotation,
taken from Sexus, begins ‘When one is
trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the
approval of friends.’ So has Sabbagh produced something ‘beyond his known
powers’ in The Square Root of Beirut’s
relation to its predecessor? The answer is both yes and no – as its title
suggested, Sabbagh’s first collection touched extensively on parent-child
relations, even if this was sometimes in a different way from its successor.
This
time, Sabbagh confronts the multiplicity and liminality of his Lebanese-British
identity and of the nature of Lebanon itself, in a manner which is specific to
these concerns, yet simultaneously (and self-consciously) preoccupied with
questions of origins and originality in a more abstract form. The result is
often compelling and, at its best, haunting and memorable; while specific in
content, the poems nonetheless embody the fragmented, deracinated twenty-first-century
post-colonial experience in more general terms. Yet the collection is never
more than a heartbeat away from the particularly, perhaps uniquely tortured
day-to-day geo-political realities and sectarian troubles of Lebanon, a land
which is ‘Janus-faced, a rabble at work and play’, a land in which ‘Meaning is
sieved, as at the end of a smoking gun’ (‘A Land Starved Of Caritas’, ll. 1, 11).
It is a land, as one poem title reminds us, of ‘One-Way Streets’, where ‘The
trees ... produce martyrs / And suicides, the willing and the unwilling.’
(ll.7-8).
In the hands of a different kind of
writer this material could have been navel gazing and introspective, but The Square Root of Beirut is not these
things. If origins are a major thematic consideration, another is connection,
and specifically the question of the poet-narrator’s relation to the human
world of which he is a part and, of course, to the places which define his
identities. Conversely, The Square Root
of Beirut is concerned equally with how these places are defined by those
that inhabit them. The collection establishes this focus on the
interrelatedness of the identities of place and self early on, and the first
poem, ‘Epistle Home’, begins with wistful longing:
I miss the chalk of my
home
And my clay red.
Knotting the tropes of a
sudden nation
The poets here are
maroon
As their rust-hues
country. (ll.1-5)
The
depiction of Lebanon is of a place ambivalent and conflicted, as much as the
poet-narrator ascribes these qualities to his own fragmented, emerging
identity. That the next poem is titled ‘The War Abroad And Within’ – with an
epigraph of ‘In spite of being born
during my parents’ exile’ – gives
further apt sense of the interdependence of the conflicted identity of both
self and place, as they are represented here. Similarly, the collection’s next
poem, ‘Legitimacy Crisis’, depicts ‘The stick and stone and the edgy fear /
[which] rive and rive and rive here, / still a nation in its teenage years.’
(ll.19-21). ‘The nation is a child at the window of its childhood’, begins the
poem ‘Arachne in Beirut’, further developing the collection’s thesis of a young
nation struggling with its growing pains.
One of the manifestations of the
collection’s concern with connection is found in the number of poems dedicated
to others, most often family members – the collection as a whole is dedicated
to the memory of Sabbagh’s uncle and maternal grandmother. Two poems are also
addressed to Sabbagh’s semi-mythical muse, ‘C’ (Sabbagh has claimed that she is
based on a young woman he encountered as an undergraduate student at Oxford)
and a wide array of intellectual and academic figures, including the Lebanese poet
Ali Zaraket (‘A ‘Social’ Winter’), Tariq Ali (‘Berry-Alive’), the psychoanalyst
Adam Phillips (‘Reel’) and the psychiatrist George Resek (‘On Anger’). As if
placing connection at the very heart of the collection, not just thematically
or metaphorically, but literally, the concentration of these poems seems
greatest at the collection’s physical centre, where poems about origins and
identity are addressed to Sabbagh’s parents, maternal grandmother and uncle. Many
of the poems represent – effectively are
themselves – another kind of dedication, to Beirut, and to Lebanon, who are the
addressees of this work as much as any living, human beings. The heart of
Beirut’s mystery is not plucked out, but that this is not possible, and that
the worthiness lies in the very contemplation of such a thing, is as close to
an overall impression as is conveyed. As stated by the epigraph from Chesterton
at the collection’s start, ‘Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an
infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite ...
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who
seeks to get the heavens into his head.’ The poet’s demeanour is calm
acceptance, whatever the irreconcilable contradictions. We will not arrive at
the Square Root of Beirut, however we search for it; as the poem of that title
reminds us, ‘There are no remedies.’ (l.11). Reinforcing the theme of
connection even further, a love poem is entitled ‘At One-Ment’, a fitting
comment on the fact that the material within a collection so concerned with the
nature of contradiction and fragmented experience actually appears so curiously
coherent. A poem towards the collection’s end, ‘Ligaments Between The Notes’ –
subtitled ‘After the Arab Spring, 2011’
– connects contemplation about the nature of identity with very recent
political events. As if connection recedes towards the end of the collection, several
late poems carry titles suggesting connection’s inverses, such as ‘Sonnet Of
The (Latent) Stalker’, ‘On Loneliness’ and the final two, ‘Empty, Emptying’ and
‘The Solitary, His Fate In Dream’.
Sabbagh’s poems are very referential,
though hardly obscurely so, and often advertise the author’s philological and
philosophical learning (Sabbagh has a PhD from Kings College for a thesis on
Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad and, after a year lecturing at the American
University in Beirut, is now embarking on a third MA, this time in Philosophy).
His third collection, Waxed Mahogany,
is already available. The poems in The
Square Root of Beirut have such coherence as parts of the same whole – although
many of the poems were first published separately, arguably the totality is
greater than the sum of its parts (or at least some of them) – that this
reviewer is already curious to see what its successor might look like. The
collection’s internal coherence is such that it would be hard to attempt a
sequel, and it should prove rewarding to see what Sabbagh does next.
Dr
Steve Van-Hagen is the editor of
James Woodhouse’s The Life and Lucubrations
of Crispinus Scriblerus: A Selection (Cheltenham: The Cyder Press, 2005)
and the author of The Poetry of Mary
Leapor and The Poetry of Jonathan
Swift (both London: Greenwich Exchange, 2011). His pamphlet collection Echoes, Ghosts and Others with Futures Ahead
of Them is available from holdfire press.
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