A Poetic Interlude

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For the Children of Gaza,

M.Staunton & R. Masilo (eds.), Onslaught Press, Oxford, 2014

My copy of this book
We all remember those controversial lines that end John Keats' famous poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn," words that were variously interpreted over the centuries and even critically dismissed by some as a weakness in the actual poem.  Those words are the most discussed two lines in all of Keats’s poetry –  " 'Beauty is truth; truth beauty',” – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." The exact meaning of those lines is disputed by everyone; no less a critic than TS Eliot considered them a blight upon an otherwise beautiful poem. Dennis Deane settled the quotation issue by pointing out that this particular formula "Beauty is truth; truth beauty" is precisely the formula used by the Artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, PRA,FRS,FRSA, an eighteenth century English painter whose specialty was portraiture. (see HERE ) He is famous also for promoting what he termed the "Grand Style" in art which depended on the idealization of the imperfect. He contended that painters should perceive their subjects through generalization and idealization, rather than by the careful copy of nature. 

Modernity and post-modernity would consign such ideas to the bin of history, given the sheer ugliness of war which has been totality self-inflicted on humanity by its own greed and hatred.  In the wake of two devastating World Wars and countless other lesser wars (in scale but not in suffering)  and many attempted genocides still sadly being self-inflicted, the aesthetic formula 'Beauty is truth; truth beauty' has been rendered ethically empty as the Nazis themselves could rape a continent in pursuit of fine art and play hundreds of concentration camp victims to death to the sound of the strains of Mozart.  Truth, we have learnt can be ugly at times; indeed, way too ugly.  Indeed, it can sicken us to our core!

This book that I am reviewing here is a beautiful book containing the bitter truth of humankind's inhumanity to some of its kind, namely the poor terrorized people of Gaza and Palestine (among so many others also, tragically, but those are other stories also worth telling and reading elsewhere!)  At the beginning, let me acknowledge a personal involvement in the enterprise as the volume contains a poetic diptych that I wrote myself. Forgetting either the merits or demerits of my own efforts, this is a very fine tribute to the suffering children of Gaza.  This volume contains the work of some forty poets and artists from all around the globe and is published by a small new publisher The Onslaught Press based in Oxford England.  One of the more impressive characteristics of this book is the artistic layout that offers a wonderful dialogue between text and image.  In this book text speaks to image and image speaks to text in a wonderfully moving way that will delight all who buy this aesthetically pleasing and ethically moving book. 

It is not a political or polemic book per se, but rather the personal responses of artists and poets, who are after all ordinary human beings, to the plight of human suffering in the blood-sodden soil of Palestine/Gaza.  However, if as we all accept that the personal always becomes political in the end, then this is a political book that points the finger, the finger of anger and shame, not just at the State of Israel, but also at ourselves and at those of us who should know better and should have learnt the bitter lessons of our sad history of terror towards one another as human beings. The editors in their preface state that "(W)e see more and more pictures of dead children on our screens and in our newspapers but the texts and speeches that accompany them are full of ambiguous and misleading words, or words with no meaning at all...The contributors to this book are telling the story of our anger and disgust and horror.... What is at stake in Gaza goes well beyond the politics of sides and enters the consideration of crime and of killing." (pp. 12 -13) The words and images in this wonderful collection are unambiguous and soul-searching, raising questions and more questions in an attempt to wake the slumbering beast of indifference that lives in all of us to life.

I will finish this review by quoting a short moving poem from this volume by the poet Anna Husain:


Child of Moments

He runs
along the shoreline
sand between his toes
his mother knows
this dancing.

He runs
imagining himself bird
imagining the air
free on his rising feathers
joy in his eyes.

He runs
instead, so swiftly ended
in to the bullets that fly
from the enemy
blood runs, blood runs.




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