In Your Blue and the Quiet Lament, Lubna Safi enchants words into poems. Poems of grave beauty, formed by looking directly at the losses. She does not turn her gaze from Syria, the broken bones of her cousin, the always falling body of Lorca, all of them almost impossible to bear. So, to seek the possible, she navigates tense, dream, "maybe," "almost". Tense, as in, "this poem is not about Syria yet"; dream, as in, a vision of the Prophet "like the outline of a body-shaped soul"; almost, as in, of Lorca's capture, "It was almost not you." The collection is marbled with writerly reflection: "syllabled," "glottal," "a slipstream of language." And twinned with writing is an urgent ethics of reading: "The only option is not to be forgotten, so please read with care." And, of course, "To read this is not enough." Through all runs an enchantment with the color blue. "Blue dreaming of/ an empty sky", the blue of "the clipped feather of a bird shed and still with the moving flight in it," and an entire conjuring of indigos her mother once painted.
-Gabeba Baderoon, author of the poetry collections, The Dream in the Next Body, A hundred silences and The History of Intimacy.
You don't pick up and read Lubna Safi's Your Blue and the Quiet Lament, you fall into it. You swim in the blue washes of landscapes, family, and communication, made of echoes, fragments, and translations. The book centers on the loss of a beloved cousin, but also distance from one's country and the way these losses reverberate through the layers of our perceptions. Lorca is the navigational guide to Safi's grief, leading the poet by echo and allusion through the eddies of saturated feeling and story. Safi has created a sensory wonder, a lament and an intimate conversation with the world, and we are lucky to overhear it.
-Rachel Richardson, author of Hundred Year Wave and Copperhead