Water's Footfall

There's modernism & then there's modernism—depending on where you are. Sohrab Sepehri was in Iran, a modernist Muslim for whom the black stone of the Kaaba was the sunlight in the flowers. He tried to invent a world in poetry and a poetry in the world as had not been seen, oh, maybe since the Nishapur of Omar Khayyam. He made it new, indeed—writing a poetry that is a geometry of breath from which music grows, with its cargo of light. And it took someone of Kazim Ali's lyrical powers to "English" Sepehri so that we can hear him today, loud and clear.