Several poets who have never been chosen before at KRG were selected from the Soviet Union, Syria, Spain and England.
Galich performing his poem about Pasternak with guitar accompaniment
The Soviet Union was an especially difficult place for poets — recall Osip Mandelstam who said:
Poetry is respected only in this country – people are killed for it. There's no place where more people are killed for poetry.
Mandelstam didn’t survive Stalin’s wrath for writing veiled unflattering verses referring to the dictator. Galich, born in Moscow but living in Sebastopol in Crimea, was more circumspect. Once he knew he was in the bad books of the official Union of Soviet Writers, being expelled from it in late 1971, he made his way out, emigrated, and lived to see his satirical poems published from exile in Western Europe. However, he came to grief by electrocution under suspicious circumstances, verifying once again the dictum of Mandelstam and the long reach of the NKVD (now called the KGB).
The poet Noor Akram Al-Hariri
Noor Akram Al-Hariri is a Syrian poet and refugee living in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. The Zaatari refugee camp is the world's largest camp for Syrian refugees, located in the Mafraq Governorate of Jordan, just 10 km from the Syrian border. Established in July 2012, it has transformed from a temporary tent settlement into a semi-permanent urban-style community that currently hosts 50,000 residents, a mere 10% of the Syrians that Jordan has provided refuge to. Here is a reel showing her writing and speaking from the camp where she lives:
Noor is not known for many poems. Indeed apart from this one poem Pamela chose which deals with her feelings of exile from Syria to Jordan (where many of her exiled compatriots live), we know of no other poem of hers. Is she a serious poet or a poster-girl chosen by UNHCR to highlight the plight of refugees? Though she has written a book = I Am a Refugee – which documents the daily struggles, memories, and hopes of the displaced people she encountered living in the Zaatari camp, this blogger could discover no other poem by her.
The sprawling Zaatari refugee camp in the desert housing 50,000 people (BBC)
In the BBC news site below you can see a video of the Zaatari refugee camp from the air. Chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet reports from Jordan on the scale of the crisis from a helicopter flying over the camp.
The manuscript page in Lorca's hand with the poem La Raiz Amarga – on the reverse was the newly discovered poem Canta el reloj
Lorca was an accidental find by Joe who came across a news item in The Guardian newspaper online on April 18 about the unearthing of a manuscript page containing a known poem on the recto, and a never before seen poem of Lorca on the verso – just 6 lines, which had lain undiscovered for 93 years after it was published! So a fresh translation into English was fashioned and here you can read it for the first time.
Smart Devices is a collection by Carol Rumens of 52 of her Poem of the Week columns from The Guardian
Another poet, Carol Rumens, whose life work has been the presentation and popularisation of hundreds of poets and poems over 20 years in her column titled Poem of the Week in The Guardian, was herself featured as a poet with a sample titled The Émigrée, just one among hundreds of her poems. She published 20 volumes of poetry between 1973 and 2024.
Besides you will meet in this account of our session celebrated poets like Walt Whitman (Passage to India) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (God’s Grandeur). The WWI war poet and essayist, Edward Thomas, is represented by an appealing poem (The Unknown Bird). Kavita chose a favourite of hers, Ada Limón, the Latina poet laureate of the United States for 3 years until April 2025. And lastly, Robert Macfarlane who combined with the illustrator Jackie Morris to produce an admirable book of nature poetry!
The Lost Words, cover of book by Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris
