Echoes in Exile

Sheema Kalbasi
PRA Publishing (2006)
ISBN 0972770372
Reviewed by Debra Gaynor for Reader Views (5/07)

Sheema Kalbasi is a stranger in a foreign land.  She movingly speaks to the oppression of religious and cultural minorities in Iran. 

Ms. Kalbasi shares the horror of war, bombs exploding, “children dying and journalist filming.”  She attempts to open the eyes of the world to the atrocities of war. The “Kaddish” speaks of the pain and death in the Middle East.  The citizens have long known war, blood in the streets and bodies riddled with bullets.

Many of her poems speak of children.  There are children in war-torn areas drawing pictures of “her dad, dead behind prison walls.”  “New England” speaks of watching her own child securely playing by the seashore, safe, with dreams of friends.  All children deserve the right to sweet dreams and good memories, but as Ms. Kalbasi shows, not all children experience them.

“For Women of Afghanistan” is heart-wrenching.  The women are widows, dying of hunger and begging for food.  These women are educated, doctors and teachers, but are not allowed to work because they are women.  “Men with unknown identity without faces decide my very existence.” 

This book is divided into two sections, the first is “Warrior” and the second is “Silent Sensuality.”  The second section speaks to love, a woman desiring a man, wanting him to touch her.   Ms. Kalbasi bares her soul to readers, sharing her love for a man and the pain and pleasure love can bring.

“Echoes in Exile” by Sheema Kalbasi is a book of poetry that readers won’t easily forget.  The poems are appealing and philosophical.  The poems speak to the rights of women and the pain of war.  She shares the pain of never being able to return home but the glory of knowing her daughter is safe and has not experienced the sound of bombs and the sight of bodies lying in the street.  Ms. Kalbasi is a tremendously gifted poet.  It is with honor I highly recommend “Echoes in Exile.”

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