Poetry
هوای تازه
Ahmad Shamlou · 1957
Synopsis
Seventy poems written from 1947 to 1956, arranged in the order of their composition in eight parts. In “Brume”, the fog covers the desert, the village lamp hides, and the speaker tells himself that if the mist held until dawn, the hidden men would come back to see their own. In “Les Fées”, three naked fairies weep at dusk like spring clouds, to the tune of nursery rhymes and tales. “Roxana” stages a dialogue between a lover and his beloved, who takes on the features of a goddess of love and death.
Context
The collection was published in Tehran in 1957, with the support of Nader Naderpour. In it the author abandons the old rhyme and metre and goes beyond Nima's prosody to forge a style of his own. Mehdi Akhavan-Sales gave it a long critique in twelve instalments of the daily Sobh-e jahan, and the imprint of Mayakovsky has been noted in several pieces. “Brume” has been read as the symbolic landscape of committed poetry after 1953; the author recited “Les Fées” in 1977 at the international poetry festival in Texas.
Who it is for
A collection of seventy poems, in Persian. It is important to know that the verse no longer follows rhyme or metre, and that several pieces borrow from nursery rhymes and tales.
Prizes and reception
The collection that made its author famous; the poet Ziya Movahed regarded it as the greatest event in Persian poetry since Hafez.