The Universe, All at Once

The Universe, All at Once is the Kurdish-Syrian poet Salim Barakat’s second book in English, translated by Huda J. Fakhreddine. The book is divided into four sections, each featuring poems selected by the poet from four different books.

In a long interview with Fakhreddine, Barakat compares his poems to “cathedrals,” but not in the religious sense: “a cathedral in poetry is the expansion of the poem’s structure in all directions.” The metaphor of a complex space is apt for Barakat’s long poems, where, in moving from one page to another, one feels like they are encountering, on each page, a new section of an enigmatic architectural marvel:

I love them without caution, as they fold me, 
gather time above me as well as place,
and stack us all one on top of the other like shirts.

And later:

I love them as drawings within drawing, 
lined up, one dimension after the other, 
until form is exhausted

Barakat’s work presents a peculiar form of difficulty: despite the guise of structure, it actively resists comprehension. The lines seem tantalizingly within grasp, yet they repeatedly slip into opacity. Fakhreddine has said that “Barakat achieves the 'poetic' […] through a deliberate occlusion of meaning behind the veil of language; language intentionally textured and thickened beyond recognition.”

I love them when they are a foot beneath reason 
or a foot above it,
minutes before illusion
or minutes after it,
an arm’s length above reconciliation 
or an arm’s length below conflict,
a span above the idea
or a span below it,
a heartbeat below fury
or a stone’s throw above silence.

In some sense, it is not just the poems that have an expansive character. Barakat also tends toward spatially expansive conception of his inner life—one that is less constrictive, I imagine, than the smallness of the self. When asked about the memories of his village, Barakat tells Fakhreddine, “I am not a villager, but I am most likely a village.”