Forest Of Noise - Mosab Abu Toha
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet from Gaza. Is a book of poems about life in Gaza - not just about in recent years, but also through the history of Palestine.
I knew this was going to be heavy when I picked it up, but I don't think I was quite prepared for the power this book contains. It's only a scant 88 pages long, but it's taken me a week or more to get through it because I had to keep putting it down. This is a hard read - but it's also a beautiful one.
The poems here are structurally and formally perhaps a little modern for my tastes, and yet these experiments and intrusions into form that I would normally find unsatisfying really come alive when paired with the subject matter. There's a violence in the scattering of words on the page, the abrupt bisection of lines. The plain, almost-too-on-the-nose language (though why shouldn't a book on this topic be direct and on-the-nose?) forces us to look directly at what is and has been going on in Gaza, gives us no choice but to see it for what it is.
Many of the poems here talk about the poet's grandfather, who he never met but who he knows throw stories. They are haunting, and beautiful, and long for a time of peace that the poet has never known. That Palestine has never truly known.
This is an arresting, haunting book, and it's one I'll think about for a long time.