Poetry Book Club - February
DISCUSSION - The Moon that Turns you Back, Hala Alyan
Oh we started strong, didn’t we?!
I debated having the discussion element of book club over on CHAT. But I find CHAT quite difficult to follow. I find the comments section of a post much easier to navigate and contribute to.
Plus, this way, even if you’ve not read the book this month you get a little glimpse inside the cover and to experience some of the magic. Perhaps hearing the discussion might help you to decide if it’s a book for you. Or if you’re not remotely interested in book club, you can hopefully just enjoy reading a couple of poems then ignore this monthly post without too much bother.
I’ll start with a little summary of my own, then some initial questions but I’d be VERY keen for this to be as interactive as it possibly can be (on a blog post).
Book Club February: The Moon that Turns you Back
Author:
, website here.Published by: Harper Collins, available here.
Key themes: Family, displacement, war, fertility, homecoming.
Oh wow, this book.
One of the things that initially stood out for me with was the experimentation with form. Hala Alyan has published five collections of poetry and I think you can tell, I felt like I was in safe hands even when I was asked as a reader on more than one occasion to get involved with ‘Interactive Fiction’ - choosing the way I would read the words on the page and the meanings I would uncover along the way.
I really liked all the experimentation. It was really clever.
This backwards and forwards feeling, the sense that you never quite knew where you were and where you were going next mirrored perfectly for me the themes of the book. One minute we were in America, then Gaza, a college campus, then a hostel. My logical head kept wanting to find some order and understand how the book was structured but time and again I was asked to sit within the discomfort of not knowing.
There are many devastating poems in the book, crucial cataloguing of the impact of war:
It felt like you were rarely far from grief. There is grief for other humans (one poem is titled, “THEY BOTH DIE ON MONDAYS IN APRIL”), grief for unborn children and grief for countries and life destroyed by war. Undoubtedly this is a political book, it demands we don’t look away and doesn’t hold back on documenting brutalities.
And yet as a poet I felt like Hala Alyan also allowed us to go inward, inward to the depths of her world - we are introduced to members of her family, places of importance and even into her dreams as well as her desires and her own feelings of displacement - as a Palestinian American and also as a woman.
The book definitely had a dream-like quality. Although sometimes you’d then be urgently brought back to reality with searingly good lines like these at the end of ‘Topography’:
“He tells you it is worth being alive just to see that blue.
He dies and they harness his body to the dirt.
He dies and the sun is out all week.”
Ok, I am saying too much and I want to know what you thought.
In order to write this post I actually enjoyed picking the book back up and seeing which poems I was drawn to read again. Many of them. I wanted to learn more about her beloved Fatima, I was tempted to read the three Ghazals in succession, there were lines I had skimmed first time round that hit harder upon second viewing. This is such accomplished poetry writing. Where to even start with ‘Spoiler’ - the final poem in the book.
I won’t describe it as an easy read. Both in terms of the themes but also at times the format. It is disquieting and complex. I actually think it will deliver far more if read cover to cover (which I’m not sure is necessarily true of all poetry books?) But if you are willing to sit together in despair, enjoy being transported into different cultures and landscapes and are interested in what constitutes a home, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
A FEW STARTING DISCUSSION POINTS:
Whilst reading the book I often felt a little lost in terms of time and place in a way that I imagine was intended. However, after finishing I have looked at the Contents page and maybe there was more of a structure than I realised. How did you find the reading experience?
On page 22 we are first introduced to the theme of pregnancy and miscarriage. A subject which then peppers the book until the final twenty pages (the last section) which is entirely dedicated to these experiences, finishing with the devastatingly emotive, “ECTOPIC”. I felt like this last part of the book was different to the others. What were your thoughts?
Which piece of experimentation with form did you most enjoy, and why?
Please don’t feel you need to answer these points. They are literally just a launch point and a few questions I wrote down along the way.
If you want to talk about your own feelings on the book then YEYYY, do that. I cannot wait to know what you thought in the comments. If you have your own questions, amazing, add them in the comments and let others give their responses. Let’s start a ton of chat about it. If you just want to make one comment like, “I really loved the title of the book” - that’s cool (and I loved it too).
And can I just add, there are NO stupid questions. And NO wrong answers. This is not a highly literary formal book club where everyone will look at you condescendingly if you ask, “what was your favourite poem?” None of that. Do I want to know what your favourite poem was? I do indeed.
The only rule is to stay constructive and kind with any criticism. Of course it’s ok to say you didn’t enjoy it, we won’t all enjoy every book, but let’s stay supportive of our fellow poets and remember that it’s bloody hard to put your poetry out into the world. Brave and admirable. We tend to be open-hearted folk who want better for the world, let’s keep that in mind, always.
Over to you…
I can’t wait to hear what you thought xxx
Oh and if you’re a paid subscriber, a reminder that this THURSDAY FEBRUARY 27th - 12.30pm (London), we have our next Poetry Circle. We’ll be chatting a bit more about the book and using it as a springboard for some writing too. I’ll send out joining instructions in the next couple of days. Come join us…
I read it whilst at chess waiting for R and J to decimate their victims. I enjoyed the experiments in form, turned the corners on three poems, found some profound and some beyond my understanding and irritating. So it must have been a good book!
The poems of death remind me of Dylan Thomas’s “After the first death, there is no other.”