Your Blue and the Quiet Lament

Your Blue and the Quiet Lament by Lubna Safi is a complex and crushing debut that centers on the speaker’s sorrow in the wake of a cousin’s brutal murder by the Syrian government. The collection’s title comes from “Elegía del silencio” by Federico García Lorca, whose tragic story (he was arrested and killed by fascist forces) parallels that of the speaker’s cousin: “Lorca offers me the curdled cry of a lament that leaks black from the sides of my mouth.” The color blue anchors this collection, with “visions of the water,” “(chastened blue surrender),” and the “fire-blue taste” of Arabic words that ring in the ears of an “Adamic son,” and “scorch his tongue.” 

“It may be that blue is an overused color,” Safi slyly contends, “and there are too many stones in poems / and too many Gods.” Indeed, blue is repeated upwards of sixty times, but the magic of this collection is that it avoids oversaturation, painting multiple swaths of colors along with deeply arresting images. We learn of the cousin’s disappearance in the book’s opening poem, “Although,” which begins: 

It was Friday—no—weeks ago someone said.
Where had they taken him?
What does his mother know?
Had anyone, in the last hour, held the blue reins of his eyes?

In “Ta’ziya” we encounter the “intrusion of condolences,” and discover that

Certain intrusions into the heart are acceptable, like slicing 
          into a marine animal to find that it has three. 

Idiosyncratic turns of phrase call attention to themselves, and the poet makes strategic use of fragmentation, as in one poem comprised of various statements that begin with “If” (“If my mother with a determination like a seed in the deep flesh of a lemon”) but offer no “then” or resolution. Another poem invokes the speaker’s mother, “just to remember her yellow ivory flesh, / its smell of lemons and distress.” Here, the near-rhyme of flesh/distress echoes the violence inflicted on the cousin, which nobody can forget. In Safi’s sensory-rich poems we see the “shimmering sound of grief / evoking grief” and hear how “time is trilling,” as we are made to feel the impossible, like a jaw strengthened “by chewing on mountains.”