The July issue of PIW welcomes the return of the PIW China and Israel domains after a period without publications. There's also poetry from Ireland, Australia and Colombia. Yao Feng is a Beijing-born poet who now resides in Macao. Several of his poems centre around the under- or unrepresented voices of history: the porters of Mount Everest expeditions; the “three thousand imperial concubines” of the Forbidden City, the survivors and victims of the Nanjing Massacre.
The problematic representation and remembrance of the unheard voices of history is also taken up as a theme by Iranian-born Ali Alizadeh, featured this month on the Australian domain, in poems such as 'My People' and 'Incinerator'.
Israel presents three very different poets, as well as accompanying articles about their work. Nano Shabtai, writes boldly and candidly, frequently about her difficult relationships with her family members. Shai Dotan’s poems range from political laments of the violence in Israel to a Wallace Stevens homage about pears. USA-born Ariel Zinder poems are sensitive and lyrical, yoking as editor Lisa Katz notes, “Jewish texts, narratives, concepts and holidays to contemporary lives”.
We also have a trio of poets from Colombia: Amparo Osorio poems are short in length but rich in elusive, nature-infused imagery. José Luis Díaz Granados’s 'The Perpetual Feast' takes up the theme of history, though that of a personal rather than a wider political history. José Zuleta Ortiz’s poems focus on the lives of other people or on the poet’s observations of the outside world: the doorkeeper of the 'Santa Barbara Hotel', a girl on a “conjugal visit”, a spider descending and ascending from its web.
The final two poets of this varied PIW issue hail from Ireland. In 'Checkpoint', a poem which so accurately conveys a contemplative, star-lit, post-pub mood, Michael Cody documents a walk home from “Maggie Dunne’s / in Carrick Beg”, while in another poem about a walk, 'Eccles Street', Gerald Smyth retraces “the epic route” made through the streets of the city by James Joyce’s Ulysses protagonist, Leopold Bloom.
To read the July editorial, articles, poet pages and poems, visit
