Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Cosmophilia
    Cosmophilia
    Cosmophilia
    Ebook118 pages42 minutes

    Cosmophilia

    By Rahat Kurd

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    What earthly use is the love of ornament? Slowing down to look closely at an inherited shawl made by hand, the title poem in Rahat Kurd’s Cosmophilia traces an object of luxury to the traditionally male art of Kashmiri shawl embroidery. The poet works with images from Kashmir, her maternal family’s place of origin, where the ability to make and appreciate beautiful things is both absolutely essential and taken for granted; where increasingly rare levels of artistic mastery are simultaneously prized and trivialized; where the struggle to carry on traditional art forms is strained by awareness of increasing obsolescence, severe political repression, and environmental degradation; a place both celebrated and dismissed as spectacle, as “paradise on earth.”

    The question persists, throughout other poems in Cosmophilia, both as self-reflexive creative practice and existential dilemma. On the concrete streets of Vancouver, the anonymity and material ease of cities tug at the poet’s consciousness of frayed traditional ideals, both philosophical and aesthetic. Religious language and rituals considered in the aftermath of a marriage take on complex, subversive, and irreverent layers in a seven-poem sequence. Allusive, playful multilingual imagery inhabits long narrative meditations, free-form couplets, and the traditional ghazal, in elegiac or sharply satirical moods. Nastaliq, a centuries-old form of Persian and Urdu calligraphy, speaks to the author through the smoke-damaged voice of a fading celebrity confessional.

    The emotionally powerful collection follows the elaborate, unexpected turns of the poet’s imagination, enlisting intricate details of memory and language and the occasional plain truth – “the hard solitude of the maker.” They intertwine political conflict and family history; they imagine Hamlet reluctantly confronting the partition of India and Pakistan. Cosmophilia translates multiple glittering facets of Muslim culture into, and reflects back from, the immediacy of embodied, urban Canadian experience.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateNov 24, 2015
    ISBN9780889229976
    Cosmophilia
    Author

    Rahat Kurd

    Rahat Kurd is a writer and poet based in Vancouver. Her most recent publication, The City That Is Leaving Forever (Talonbooks 2021), is a hybrid of correspondence and poetry exchanged between Vancouver and Kashmir over a five year period with poet Sumayya Syed. Kurd’s first collection of poems, Cosmophilia, was published by Talonbooks in 2015. Kurd draws on multilingual poetics and is especially interested in the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature. With writer and poet Meredith Quartermain, Kurd co-curated and co-hosted The Rhizomatic, a monthly online poetry series featuring a single guest in a deep-dive format, from September 2020 until June 2021. Kurd was the guest editor of the 2019 Summer Supplement issue of The Puritan online literary magazine, publishing poetry and fiction around the theme, “What does it mean to be a Muslim writer?” Commissioned by composer Brian Current , Kurd’s libretto “Light Upon Light” was performed as part of an oratorio, The River of Light, at the Vancouver Opera Festival in May 2019.

    Related to Cosmophilia

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Poetry Rx: This Is the Year

      Jan 3, 2019

      Poetry Rx: This Is the Year
      7 min read

    • Article

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • Article

      Jasmine Fingers

      Aug 22, 2019

      Jasmine Fingers
      14 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      As when listening to a story, children always want to knowthe next thing before sleep until they wake and the morning becomesancient, so too those beginning at love first ask, Is it real?—and then years later,Was it a memory?—only to stare at a vast

      1 min read

    • Article

      Wide Open Wordsmiths

      May 5, 2022

      Wide Open Wordsmiths
      5 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: March 2021

      Mar 4, 2021

      Our own Nick Ripatrazone takes a look at six new poetry titles from the likes of Adrienne Su, Dennis James Sweeney, and Karen Fish. The post Must-Read Poetry: March 2021 appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Wonderful Things

      Sep 7, 2023

      SHORTLISTED IN WM’S TUTANKHAMUN POETRY COMPETITION WERE: Guy Carter, Petersfield, Hampshire; Christine Griffin, Hucclecote, Gloucester; Sarah Das Gupta, Mamuden, Essex; Tracey Kitchen, Daventry, Northamptonshire; Lesley Mason, Norwich, Norfolk; Julie

      5 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2020

      How on the Kama River the eye grows dark,when the cities stand on oaken knees. Disguising itself in a web, beard to beard,the burning pine grove runs, younger in the water. The water resisted one hundred and four oars,bearing them up and down to Kaza

      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2019

      “My arm is so brown and so beautiful,” is a thought I haveas I’m about to turn off the lamp and go to sleep.I look at it a moment in the soft glow, and see it, briefly,as though it belonged to someone else. A reddishkind of brown, like a toasted almo

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Island (catullus 64)

      Mar 1, 2022

      Back then the evergreens tumbled downriverfrom the glaze-white runoff to the boot-stirred puddlesof amber young men who fulfilled our destiny,who clambered into ships, on horses, and in wagonspainting the newfound landscapes ours.Our calling was nobl

      9 min read

    • Article

      After Kaddish

      Sep 27, 2018

      After Kaddish
      9 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2017

      Sep 11, 2017

      Isn’t that one of the purest goals of poetry—to justify our breaths? To recognize that we matter? The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2022

      -ina: This suffix is used as an independent name,but doesn’t your little one deserve more?—a baby name origins website as in, I spent my playground days gasping endless into a machineas in, my elders blessed me with a second name, to ward off spirits

      5 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Feb 28, 2023

      For Sudeep Sen I know how grateful you were for myconfession. I, too, had been trusted, I, too,desired, and felt the other mess of need,the clumsy psychology of powerand uselessness. I, too, had betrayed,had confessed, had faced her wailrushing down

      3 min read

    • Article

      In The Spotlight:your Writing Dark Side

      Dec 7, 2023

      Spooky season evidently offered creative inspiration aplenty for the WM writers, who responded to the call for writing in November’s crime-themed issue on the theme of ‘Dark Side’ with our fullest mailbox yet. The poetry and prose sent in demonstrate

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Mar 2, 2020

      The pawn is the soul of chess. —François-André Danican Philidor, Analysis of the Game of Chess, 1749 But only when I am wrapped, naked, by these soft spring clouds of evening steam, as now, do I feel I could well become someone from a past age. The

      4 min read

    • Article

      Holiday For One

      Mar 24, 2023

      Holiday For One
      4 min read

    • Article

      Make Way For The Muse

      May 13, 2019

      Make Way For The Muse
      5 min read

    • Article

      Chimes

      Nov 24, 2020

      Thin slices of gold edge the velvety soft paper, delicate as lace and smelling of afternoon tea. The inscriptions are faded—some in pencil—lovingly addressed to grandchildren, parents, and friends. My fingertips trace the scripts, exquisitely crafted

      2 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: May 2020

      May 6, 2020

      Our own Nick Ripatrazone takes a look a new poetry from John Freeman, Rosanna Warren, Juditha Dowd and Kiki Petrosino—plus an anthology edited Leah Silvieus and Lee Herrick. The post Must-Read Poetry: May 2020 appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      An Ode To Persian Hospitality

      Mar 16, 2022

      An Ode To Persian Hospitality
      2 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Joseph Brodsky

      May 12, 2020

      Two Poems by Joseph Brodsky
      7 min read

    • Article

      Road To Perdition

      Jun 11, 2022

      Road To Perdition
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Cosmophilia

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Cosmophilia - Rahat Kurd

      SHISH MAHAL

      I am the mirror palace of the annihilated.

      In the arc of my splendour the shattered shelter –

      In the vault that houses the lamp every glittering facet is mine.

      Every facet a crystal of pain, formed in every heart that yields to me –

      And every heart that yields its pain to me reflects mine.

      BURNABY, EVENING, APRIL

      the stranger passed here,

      to let the stranger pass there.

      – Mahmoud Darwish

      I walk through shards of glitter today.

      Through a glass and steel house of teenage desire –

      expensively curated, easily bruised.

      Then cars stream past, all threats and cold shoulders.

      Asphalt and concrete mock my every step: Absence

      sufficed you before. Is this poetry, the frail thread

      that pulls you here now? Private lawns inhale their poisons.

      Against the slant of gold light, compassion moves

      its hobbled instrument. Spring evening on a downward slope

      to your stunned absence, written in the faces of the women

      to whom you splendidly belonged. Endurance,

      written there too, forces back my disbelief; my glance,

      faltering, to the floor. I walk today

      not in the beginning of loneliness

      but in dread of its return, as if the black coat

      I’d slipped off and forgotten years ago

      were to appear on that park bench, folded, waiting,

      unmistakably mine. Someone knew I would pass this way,

      stranger descending a wide bowl of earth ringed with mountains.

      Their blue when dusk swells and blurs them

      recalls blue domes of Shiraz, hills of besieged Sarajevo,

      held breath of Srinagar at curfew, its mothers fearful;

      its teenagers impatient to begin

      the beautiful arguments we will never begin.

      Our footprints won’t keep pace in any other dust.

      We won’t trace our names on the walls of old Delhi,

      we won’t warm our hands on the walls of old Kashan.

      Except for the May night I read Faiz in Shahid’s English

      and you delighted everyone with Faiz in his own Urdu,

      we spent all the time we would ever have

      describing borders of suspicion we’d circled in tedium,

      hands up, passports high, on this unceded ground

      I now profane with every step

      I take in your absence.

      Gold light grows fainter,

      each rebuke more insistent, plainer:

      Who would welcome you, after Burnaby?

      What language, broken, avails you now?

      In memory of Usamah Ansari, 1985–2008

      COSMOPHILIA

      It was hereditary for an embroiderer’s son

      to be an embroiderer’s son.

      – FRANÇOIS BERNIER

      Travels of the Mughal Empire, 1663

      1

      We will never meet.

      I will not live

      to know her name.

      I will sew my initials

      into the fresh length of wool

      she will inherit

      when worn and faded.

      In my smallest stitches

      she will discern

      with pleasure

      the shine of silk filament.

      Across half a century

      our fingers will touch,

      here, on the bright border,

      when she reads

      in the spacing of each leaf

      curling backward off a vine,

      the rhythm of my breath,

      the blood-beat in my deft hand,

      a collaboration

      that insists and insists,

      in the midst of snags,

      tears, and ordinary despair,

      on being looked at.

      In circles and half-circles,

      in tight arabesques or loose spirals

      my lines expand out, almost double back;

      as if in restless, rigorous thought

      each complex elaboration

      integral to the harmony of the whole;

      not rushing any part of the particular,

      not the curled tip of the smallest leaf.

      Petal by petal, paisley by paisley,

      I make summer creep and flourish

      across a wintry field

      to wrap her shoulders

      in a single enduring embrace.

      2

      At nine, still slipping

      shyly to the edge,

      still learning how

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1