Sheema Kalbasi's Debut Collection of Poetry

To Buy:   Amazon

Winner of the Indie Excellence Award for Social Change in 2008

Nominated for Pushcart Prize 2007

In her poem, "New England" Sheema Kalbasi writes:

She slips the shelves and shadows

of her new found friends within
the walls of her nights dream before another
summer-morning lights the start of the day

...and through this steady music and bright vision we enter the world of a fine poet, who, like her daughter, dances among, and slips the shadows and shelves of both her heritage and her new home to become something startlingly fresh and vibrant. A beautiful book.  An important new voice.  

--Dr. Joel B. Peckham, Jr., Author of Night Walking, and Asleep at the Wheel

Through compassion and wisdom she weaves the world together with her vivid words. World history is not national, it is international, and in her words, I found traces of my history, my life, my grief, and my desires. Sheema, a world citizen, shows in this powerful book, that just as the Earth is gold at its core, moving hot liquid, she does too.

--Birgitta Jonsdottir, poet and editor of the Book of Hope (including works by His Holiness The Dalai Lama, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Rita Dove and Ron Whitehead).

There are honest & hard won poems here. They speak of pain & cruelty & loss, the very elements that separate us from each other – to our mutual sorrow. There is also love & hope for redemption.  Heartfelt & true.  

--Roger Aplon, poet and writer

Sheema Kalbasi belongs to that world-wide community of the passionate and caring, who write of exile, injustice and desire.

--Wayne Amtzis, poet, photographer, and editor

Kalbasi's poetry is generous and abundantly human, passionate and compassionate.

--Jimmy Santiago Baca, award winning poet, and author of Immigrants in Our Own Land

In an age of extremes, be they from the right or the left, from any and all religions, it is rare to hear a voice of reason, mature and graceful. Sheema Kalbasi has that voice. Echoes in Exile is a cry in the wilderness, an oratorio Kalbasi says she needs to "write to keep nothing from overloading nothing." We learn more about the world in these poems, and thus, about ourselves.

--Daniel Y. Harris, M. Div. lecturer, essayist, poet, and translator-

Sheema Kalbasi's debut collection documents her struggle to confront the past and absorb a new culture.  Born in Iran and now living in the United States, she handles complex threads of the Middle Eastern tapestry (which she refers to in "Kaddish" as God's "bloody sore") and weaves her own vivid fabric within it.  Part chronicle of losses, self-doubt, and of what is retained (family), part polemic against an oppressive past and quest for her own identity, Kalbasi's concluding account of a passionate interlude reveals her evolving consciousness.

--D. H. Melhem, author of New York Poems and Rest in Love

Sheema Kalbasi's credentials are impressive: award winning Iranian-born poet; human rights activist; literary translator; Director of Dialogue of Nations through Poetry in Translation; Director of Poetry of Iranian Women Project; passionate and outspoken defender of ethnic and religious minorities' rights. This latest book has drawn high praise from critics internationally, praise that is well deserved. Skillfully, through words, Ms. Kalbasi has transformed sorrow and loss into forged steel. She writes of love, loss, exile, and brave women who protect their children and defuse hate through their very existence.

Kalbasi lives in the U.S. now but honors her Iranian heritage. In this excerpt from "Dancing Tango" she remembers the city of Esphahan and the Zayandehrood River:

Time is eternity, my dignity
resides in yours and your
words are wonders that I count
as precious coins kept quietly
in the pockets of my ears.

"Nothing" shares the poet's sorrow at witnessing the destruction of a people and their ancient culture, all reported stoically and systematically in the news:

The bombs, lights that blind, and Damascus,
Burning after Teheran. Sisters calling in despair,
Brothers ambivalent to the arms of infidels. Nothing
happens,
But children die, and journalists are filming for a
deadline.

"Kaddish" is a powerful poem best read in its entirety:

And on the eighth day
God created his bloody sore,
the Middle East
Where only the streets
silently
speak of the dead,
where the buttercups
cups, cups are red
from blood,
where bodies are tossed
in oil, oil,
hot hot oil.

Don't burn your finger God
on the ziz,
red, red ziz. (ziz — flower, cleft, or pass)

Allah-o-Akbar! (God is great.)

"For Women of Afghanistan" is a hard truth, a reality most people of the Western world give less than passing thought. In few words, this excerpt reveals much:

As I walk in the streets of Kabul,
behind the painted windows,
there are broken hearts, broken women.
If they don't have any male family to accompany them,
they die of hunger while begging for bread,
the former teachers, doctors, professors
are today nothing but walking hungry houses.

This excerpt from "Mama in the War" extols the quiet courage of women in all wars, everywhere through time. Such women, standing firm without weapons amidst war's chaos, are the real heroes and not the presidents, potentates, politicians, or warriors:

You are my president, mama,
you and all those women
who protected
and still defend their children
against the blinded-with-hatred
soldiers of death
all around the world.

"Eternal Friendship" is brief and to the point. Nothing is eternal:

No! Friendships are not eternal. Nothing is eternal. Not
family, not friendships, not love, not lust. Nothing...not
even the wandering eyes that will read these lines in
wonder.

Sheema Kalbasi misses her homeland, her ancient culture and its beautiful legacy. She shares her loss and sorrow, from exile, through poetry, because she prefers exile to slavery or death. Echoes in Exile is an exceptional work and highly recommended.

--Laurel Johnson, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review, Laurel's Bookshelf

The simplicity of Sheema Kalbasi's work masks an anger that simmers below the surface of many of her poems, but the anger is always tempered with profound sadness at the senselessness of it all, her pity for those helpless innocents who suffer most and are forgotten all too soon is uppermost.

Wilfred Owen, probably the greatest anti-war poet ever, wrote about his poetry that 'My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." In her poem Nothing Kalbasi writes the line; 'children die, and journalists are filming for a deadline'... simple words that encapsulate the futility of it all, words that move me deeply because like Owens' work, the poetry is in the pity... But these 'Echoes in Exile' are not, in the main, reflections on war, they are touching snapshots of her family, hymns to other exiles, reflections on humanity, explorations of her own sensuality and glimpses into her private meditations, at times she lets the reader get so close that I feel that she is literally reaching out to touch me.

The poems in this magnificent collection are expansive and profound and yet are also, in one sense, ambiguous; they deserve an audience who will appreciate their simplicity and their depth, wherein their inherent ambiguity lies. I find myself memorizing large sections without even realizing I am doing it and exploring these memories repeatedly in moments of solitude, words and phrases return to haunt me provocatively.

If you are among the few who know that poetry is the highest of all the arts, if you are one of those special people who need stimulating with an excess of profundity, then this is a work you will cherish and return to time and again; with love in your heart and with your wisdom multiplied a thousand fold.

--Alan Corkish

Many are the feelings and sensations 'echoing'—nearly overflowing—from this moving collection. Like the intimate bond the author herself describes as connecting the world of dreams and the world of reality, her verses run on the thin edge between a subtle series of opposites. Resignation and hope, sorrow and joy, loneliness and communion, loss and conquest, desire and aversion, war and peace: all these confront each other, repel each other but never separate completely, yet interlace weaving the arduous story of the poet. By using words now sweet but stern, now sharp but responsive—however always in a straight diction, without frills—Sheema Kalbasi retraces her past, the hard trip of a young girl who fled from her tormented home country, that 'modern' Iran she still likes to call the Ancient Persia, to search for a new home, a new life, her freedom.

So Mighty Are the Stories ... but likewise she can look at the present and the future with neat realism, as well as with intact wonder, so that her Mel lowly-poetical voice streams with messages not only of despondency and denunciation, but also of courage and anticipation. These Echoes In Exile then turn into the author's chant of liberation, revealing her self-sustaining force before the hatred and the division ubiquitous in the world and afflicting—above all— her beloved Middle East.

From line to line the refugee, the 'nobody' she used to name herself at the time of her flight, they all show up in their vigor and radiance, disclosing to us the true identity of the poet and her discreet, unique sensuality—not screamed out, just whispered. So a clear-cut figure and a transparent character finally come to light—simply those of a woman deeply able and willing to love.

--Alessio Zanelli

Already, this new century seems as deafened by ideological clamor as the last, plagued by residues of cultural and literary separatism sometimes bordering on a kind of 'aesthetic apartheid'. For nations increasingly brought face-to-face across cultural divides - chasms that are now as much internal as external - the need for conversation, on its many levels, has never been more essential. Poetry, with its potential for radical openness and self-revelation, is an ideal prompt and vehicle for that conversation. Many kinds of voice continue to lie dormant in the English-speaking world; but we have at least begun to witness, in more recent times, some breakings of silence. In its quiet, intimate way, 'Echoes in Exile' reverberates with that desire to speak up. Of Iranian descent, Kalbasi is one of a swelling stream of poets now beginning to establish the conversation's many-sidedness.

--Dr. Mario Petrucci,award winning poet and writer