The Twelfth Man

Not enough attention has been paid to the poets of the Indian sub continent, among whom Iftikhar Arif  is a distinctive and memorable voice. Some, like the now almost forgotten Dom Moraes, have written in English, but the vernacular languages have never lost their grip, and Arif writes in Urdu. Interestingly, though, his poems work extremely well in English too, he is one of those fortunate to be eminently translatable. Moreover, we enter a not particularly strange world here. Strange, yes, in the sense that all real poetry is in some sense strange; but these poems belong to the modern world and are acquainted with irony as much as myth. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay them is to say that they are alive, as poems, in English. How much more so, then , in their original language!
Derek Mahon