Deep Are These Distances between Us

Darius Atefat-Peckham’s mother, Iranian American poet Susan Atefat-Peckham, died in a car accident when he was three years old. He brings us her second collection, Deep Are These Distances between Us, with a moving and celebratory preface. The book opens with an essay by “Susie,” in which she recounts flushing a manuscript down the airplane toilet on a trip to Iran, her parents afraid of “[g]overnment workers in Tehran airport,” who, “[h]ad they seen that I was a writer […] would have detained us for hours of questioning.”

What follows are intimate poems that beckon the reader into the “dark black mouth of memory.” The speaker’s grandfather “cuts his old / hats in pieces before he throws them out,” while

[…] Mother now cuts
almost everything. She’s a serious cutter
of old bills, letters, socks, and underwear,
even pants, and when she cuts I see
his hands snipping the old Stetson.

The poet grapples with cultural restrictions placed on women in Iran in “Tara,” a poem for a cousin imprisoned for adultery. Tara’s daughter is in the custody of a husband who “can easily choose one /woman over the other,” and the speaker “wonder[s], how / easily decisions can come to a man[…].”

The book’s second section, “Lovers,” expands the term to include friends, as in “At the Airport,” which begins,

            Friend, I understand
this much: you crushed me
open. Listen:
                        we are the bells,
half-worlds, our mouths
hollow like a life never lived

A poignant series of poems for a son is linked by the phrase “and I am glad.” The speaker first addresses her “unborn son”: “You are the quiet knot I carry.” In “To My Son at Seven Months,” she presciently imagines separation by her own death:

                                              When
The earth should fold my breathing
To its breast and hold me there, I would
Swallow stones, would tear its roots,
Its trees, for missing you, your face.

These elegiac poems reverberate with life, a reminder that the poet lives on through her work:

[…] But Grandfather,
tell me the stars. Tell me
the nowhere. Because I am still
in the universe. I breathe in
this good earth and call it
my own.