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Rafiq Kathwari

Poet Rafiq Kathwari

Biography

RAFIQ KATHWARI is the first non-Irish recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. He has lived most of his adult life in New York, but was born, as he puts it, “a Scorpio at midnight” in the disputed Kashmir Valley. He obtained an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University and a Masters in Political and Social Science from the New School University. He divides his time between New York, Dublin and Kashmir.

Genre: Poetry
Number of publications: 1

Rafiq Kathwari's poetry — often set in Kashmir — is breathtakingly beautiful, piercingly honest, wildly exotic yet universal too, as if you put Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri in a blender.

— Susan Shapiro

Sample Work

Sample Poems From In Another Country

In Another Country

for Agha Shahid Ali

In Kashmir, half-asleep, Mother listens to the rain.
In Manhattan, I feel her presence in the rain.

A rooster precedes the Call to Prayer at Dawn:
God is a namedropper: all names at once in the rain.

Forsythias shrivel in a glass vase on her nightstand.
On my windowsills, wilted petals, a petulance in the rain.

She must wonder when I will put on the kettle,
butter the crumpets, observe silence in the rain.

She veils her hair, offers a prayer across the oceans,
water on my hands becomes a reverence in the rain.

At Jewel House in Srinagar, Mother reshapes my ghazal.
“No enjambments!” she says as I listen in the rain.

“Rafiq,” I hear her call above the city din.
The kettle whistles: Mother’s scent in the rain.

 

Starting my Descent

After a bomb rips the baggage claim
I sprout wings running on the tarmac.
Single file khakis blurring smashed
gold of mustard flowers. My legs

collapse. I roar over tips of poplars, follow
the Jhelum upstream where Mother
kneeling at the river’s source tears open
a pomegranate with bare hands. “Rubies

from my dowry stolen by the in-laws.”
Her dupatta undulates and she floats away
reclined on the veil. I give chase, soaring
above the Himalayas, depression fuming

over the Pacific. I am the pallor of twilight
starting my descent. A sign rises to greet me —
The Gilded Cage For The Deranged.
“Wait,” a nurse says as I search for Mother.

“Why aren’t you already where you’re going?”

Books

In Another Country
In Another Country Poetry Book by Rafiq Kathwari published by Doire Press

ISBN: 978-1-907682-40-7 | Pages: 80 | Published: 2015

A Kashmiri poet, who writes in English, spent his youth in New York and wound up in Ireland to win the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, Rafiq became the first non-Irish recipient of the prestigious award. In Another Country is an experience of loss — defined by his mother’s lifelong battle with schizophrenia that forms a recurring theme in the volume (reviewed by Sadiq Shaban, Khaleej Times).

12,00

Notice

Doire Press is out of the office from October 6th to October 14th. Please note that orders won’t be posted until October 15th.
Thank you,
Lisa and John,
Doire Press