Set to Music a Wildfire by Ruth Awad (review)

Awad's debut poetry collection beats with desire. In the fifty poems that comprise its three parts, Awad yearns with the taut urgency of understanding her past and her present. "Born into War," "House Made of Breath," and "What the Living Know" chart the war-torn journey of her discovery. Death and life are bridged by fragility, suggesting Awad's finding that when the fighting subsides, one has no other option than to gather the spoils of war and build from them. Whether reimagining her father's experiences on the battlefield during the impossible upheaval of the Lebanese Civil War, or navigating the painful aftermath of divorce's destruction, Awad equalizes the personal and the political. She asks, "…My God, will I ever not be // surprised by what I can survive?…" This question hums insistently throughout as she suggests the possibility that what almost destroys—country, family, person—can be just as deadly as what does, and perhaps even more difficult to overcome.

Awad opens with the poem entitled, "Let me be a lamb in a world that wants my lion." From the very first line, she frames the collection in Biblical imagery: "In the beginning, there was an angel…." The reference to Genesis's opening words suggests a collective commonality: her world and ours each begins in the same place. That we are not able to sustain the closeness of our beginnings, that we sacrifice peace for our greedy desires is underscored with the allusions that follow to the Ten Plagues and the Tower of Babel. In each of these narratives, humanity is destroyed for refusing to understand that there is space enough in the world for everyone.

Awad's poems are like the war they describe—harsh, transparent, and unflinching. They lock gaze and refuse to blink or look away. Her work insists upon images of blood, fire, skulls, and bullets juxtaposed against paper, language, words, and bodies—seeming to suggest her belief that only through the discourse of language can the horrors of war be understood and made meaningful. Her gifts for simile and metaphor-building wrap the war's complexity into tinier moments we can attempt to carry. In "Inheritance," her fifteen-year-old father learns the necessity of faking his death to save his life, "extremities folded like a paper star, / the pebbles freckled around him, / an inheritance." In "Elevator," her father's family hangs suspended "like a half-swallowed bite." And while it is difficult to evoke the immensity of the "Sabra and Shatila Massacre," Awad breaks it down to one chilling image: her father's desperation when amidst that destruction he realizes his feet stand planted on "a hummock of corpses. Quicksand. / Unbearably soft." That war will literally and metaphorically shift the ground from underneath you is a recurring theme for Awad. Her descriptions are striking and surprising: Beirut's dividing line is a "cesarean scar," a woman's frazzled breath through the camp is a "sizzled wick," and the streets flutter with "breathing paper, beating paper" of the names of the posted dead.

Awad's poetic line accomplishes the extraordinary task of being both packed and sparse. Her command of diction is formal and exquisite, her soundwork precise and unrelenting, and she masters the art of sculpting nouns into verbs. She hears "…tree roots spidering" describes the place "where your bones ornament the pines" and where the "… narrow lane [is] laddered / with clotheslines…." There is a vital sense that there exists no excess here. Consider the closing two couplets of "Sabra and Shatila Massacre" for this startling effect: "White building, throat necklaced / with clothesline, each scarf beats with a stolen pulse. // Too many to count. / The whole land nailed under that gallop." Remove any word here only at the peril of losing something critical. Note her direct address to the suicide bomber in "The Bride of the South:" "Welcome the stubbled Israeli convoys ahead. / Whatever happens, don't waver. / Wade the car up to them, your hair/ wisping out the open window, a...