Canadian poet Yusuf Saadi
Pleasuring Shahrazad
In rosewater I rinse
my final words, dip
them into your body.
Your slow, saline drip
on my tongue. You eclipse
Medinan dates soaked
in honey, saffron rice
with diced pistachios,
a single pomegranate—
surah carved in Kufic
on each ruby seed.
Camphor recites its being
inside a kerosene lamp.
Don’t plead, simply ask
for pleasure pleated
upon pleasure past
tongue-winding rinds
around words.
Damascus musk settles
on damask pillows.
Iced watermelon wine
gushes in crystal glass.
Hebron peaches blush;
sea-coast lemons
cleave in halves.
My nails moonrake
damp thighs;
again, I dine on
webbed-wet fingers.
Lips graze lashes, kohl.
On each closed eyelid
my tongue practises
its patient whorl
before I cherish
your perfect pearl.
I gave my day
dreaming of your
myrrh’s mystique.
Now my tongue
is to caress—
not to speak.
Yusef Saadi from Pluviophile, Nightwood, 2020 and the Malahat Review, Fall 2019
Pun intended. What a pleasure to read the concluding poem of Montreal-based Yusef Saadi’s debut poetry collection that was short-listed for the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. Wow. Debut book and short-listed for one of the most prestigious poetry prizes going!
Yusef loves words and word play in a way that reminds me of American Canadian poet Heather McHugh. Both of them such playful wordsmiths but can also deliver a serious punch. The title of Yusef’s book shows his love of sonically rich words, this one a made up word that has made the rounds of the internet it seems since 2016. And Yusef notes it is a mix up of greek (pluvio) and latin (phile). And not surprising it has been given a definition on line of a lover of rain!
(Now, a serious tangent! Well, please let me confess I am a Pluviophile but not necessarily a lover of rain! No, I am a lover of truly, one of the finest culinary establishments I have ever had the pleasure to eat at! Pluvio in Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Run by two thirty-something partners Warren Barr + Lily Verney-Downey the service and food in the restaurant is exemplary. Kinda like Yusef’s poetic offerings.)
Now back to Yusef and his book! What a thrill when I open a book where lines and poems spring off the page. No prosey plodding. I will say more about the spring-loaded language and cadences of Pleasuring Shahrazad but there are many other great moments in Yusef’s book. How about this: …writing poetry at night/ with the rust from our lives. And this from a poem on the afterlife: Don’t you miss//feeling, feeling, feeling? And failing, the soul search/ follows, from which you promise yourself to be reborn? Gorgeous.
And so much of this gorgeousness, but even more sonically attuned, in Pleasuring Shahrazad . The rich seductive language, the musical notes hit again and again and its sheer erotic exuberance. And the point of view! Not from Shahrazad’s point of view! After all, in the 1001 Nights she is storytelling to save her life! But so refreshing to having her being pleasured! About time!
Here is what Yusef says about his inspiration for the poem as quoted in Canadian poet Susan Gillis’s blog Concrete & River in June of 2020.
I had just finished reading One Thousand and One Nights, where, famously, Shahrazad must narrate a story to the king in order to entertain him all night so he doesn’t kill her. I was thinking about the interaction of language and sensuality, the kinds of sensuality on the surfaces of language and beyond language, and how the body incites language and vice versa.
Look at all the poetic craft and delicacy in this poem not to forget all the literal delicacies he puts on this poem’s plate! All these fabulous musical and image-rich moments. And listen to the feast of “s” sounds in the poem!:
Your slow, saline drip
on my tongue.
surah carved in Kufic
on each ruby seed.
Don’t plead, simply ask
for pleasure pleated
upon pleasure past
tongue-winding rinds
around words.
Damascus musk settles
on damask pillows.
And hear the crescendo of “s” sounds in the feels-so-right ending:
Now my tongue
is to caress—
not to speak.
This love song to words. this love song to a body!
This book deserves many readings. It defies easy categorizations. Lots of different forms: fourteen sonnets a prose poem, short line poems, long line poems, poems that break the left margin tyranny. And the poems, perhaps more lyric than narrative but the narrative has lyric turbo-charging. I think of his poem CHILD SACRIFICE where after describing an Inca child sacrifice he adds images of dead children that are as current as today’s pictures in the news. The lyric turbo charging here:
this world, its night not quite as pure
as the darkness before creation,
stars so ripe you could pluck
them all off the sky,
stars like children floating on
as sea between countries,
each breath a small eruption
of home....
For refugee children dying at sea, what a line: an eruption of home. But them, their soon to be gone breath, homeless. Home, their breath, leaving them.
If lyric is a celebration of beauty, of moments out of time there are lots of these poems. A praise poem to light: LOVE SONNET FOR LIGHT; EVE INVENTING POETRY BY HER WINDOW DURING THE FIRST RAINFALL; RILKE’S HANDS and LOVE POEM FOR NUSAYBAH’S HIJAB and many more.
I celebrate this book. Here, I meet Montreal city streets, I meet the physics of light, crowded Toronto highways, lots of moonlight (moon-like images on the cover), and poems of deep social and cultural awareness. I meet poems with small domestic focus. And I meet and am silenced by poems with a larger focus on current world events, especially in the astonishing prose poem ROUGH DRAFT which is an interview with a woman and her son, likely in Afghanistan, after a catastrophic bombing attack from the air.
I will end with some lines near the ending of ROUGH DRAFT:
………..Our families were carried to the sky in those heaps of black
ash. They will come back down to visit us as mountain snow in the
winter, and the snowflakes will melt in our palms.