The Scottish Divan

The Scottish Divan grows out of the lived experience of a Shirazi poet living in northwest England and eastern Scotland, with a longing to write in other languages-a longing that gives rise to a form of intercultural translation within the process of composition itself. While looking across a broad range of aesthetic traditions in Persian poetry, past and present-particularly the poetry of Hafez-the poems in this collection also remain open to the sensibilities, emotional registers, narrative practices, and formal techniques of modern and contemporary Scottish and English poetry. Collage-like narratives and images, new experiments with metre and rhyme, and the use of triplets and quintains in a number of the poems reflect this openness. Just as some poems in The Scottish Divan reveal the poet's preoccupation with the homelands and religions of some of the communities at the margins of Iranian society, such as Armenians and Mandaeans, others become meeting grounds for various sorts of writing, including the aphoristic, the chronicle-like, and the devotional. Despite the variety of sacred texts woven into the fabric of the poems, the theological centre of gravity of the Divan is Christian theology. From this source emerge the echoes of the two Testaments, the resonance of the pipe organ, and the light of stained-glass windows that colour some of the pieces. Churches, colleges, libraries, city streets, and country roads are among the settings in which memories of Iran and Armenia mingle with British place names and the sound of church bells. The title Divan gestures toward the openness and incompleteness of the collection: the possibility that it may welcome further poems in the future.