Review of Dilruba Ahmed's Bring Now the Angels
December 16, 2020
Dilruba Ahmed’s Bring Now the Angels is a collection of poems that bravely documents the simultaneously difficult and joyful moment of its creation. The poems explore Ahmed’s father’s illness and subsequent death, her relationship to her young sons, and the challenging circumstances of modern life in America. These three topics are equally present and provide witness to their personal and historical moment.
The poems that describe the poet’s father’s illness are remarkable for their visceral images. Ahmed’s use of images centering on the body is particularly effective. In the first section’s opening poem, “The Feast,” Ahmed describes a final family picnic where her father slices a melon with “each piece bleeding onto a white plate” and grills meat from “blood red to clear.” In describing one of the last happy family gatherings before her father’s illness, Ahmed foreshadows the disturbing nature of what is to come.
As the first section progresses, we witness the indignities of Ahmed’s father’s illness. “The Longest Hour” shows us the ways the body fails us and the ways illness becomes a humiliating experience: “[t]he too short gown. The catheter.” As the poem continues, Ahmed asks,
Will nothing
be spared; will nothing remain unseen?
When the body undoes
its beauty, will you see how shroud-like
the bed sheets, how small the bones
against them?
After her father’s eventual death, in “Extending the Invitation,” Ahmed comes to the conclusion that there is “[n]othing to do now but grieve.” While describing the sound of the “endless grating” of the casket being lowered into the open grave at his funeral, she reminds us of the essential paradox that death presents:
…the living know
nothing, and can speak —while the dead
know everything, but are mute.
Section II finds Ahmed returning to a life without her father. In “Drift,” she finds that there “is still, somehow, laughter in the fields. Poppies making the grass a slow wildfire…” in the woods where she plays with her sons. This moment of connection with her sons among the beauty of nature stands in stark context to the disturbing images of the prior section. In this poem, we see how Ahmed’s relationship to her children is changed after her father’s death, deepened with a new appreciation of time’s “darker and darker shades of gold.” By focusing on the fleeting nature of time, Ahmed calls us to both appreciate the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of our own lives.
The end of the collection finds Ahmed discussing the greater world at large. These poems focus on global issues: the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; underground education for girls in countries where the Taliban is in control; and climate change, among others. As readers, we see a shift in the collection at this point from the personal to the political. Although, due to Ahmed’s skilled writing, it becomes clear that the personal and the political are inextricably linked.
Dilruba Ahmed’s Bring Now the Angels bravely confronts a difficult time in the poet’s life. These poems are both the wound and the balm. They provide the reader with a visceral retelling of her experience while also having the courage to ask difficult questions about the role of suffering in our modern world.
Brooke Palma grew up in Philadelphia and currently lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Many of her poems focus on the connections between culture and identity and finding beauty in the everyday. Her work has been published in The Mad Poets’ Review, Moonstone Arts, Toho Journal, and E-Verse Radio (online), and work is forthcoming in Unbearables: A Global Anthology (spring 2021). Her chapbook, Conversations Unfinished, was published by Moonstone Press in August 2019. She hosts the Livin’ on Luck Poetry Series at Barnaby’s West Chester.