Review: Set to Music a Wildfire by Ruth Awad

Reviewed by Tyler Robert Sheldon

Set to Music a Wildfire
Poems by Ruth Awad
Southern Indiana Review Press, October 2017
$14.95, 84 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1930508408

Ruth Awad’s debut poetry collection Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, is a study in self and survival. Through conversations with her father, Awad’s speaker discovers the father’s home country: Lebanon in the grip of brutal civil war. The book opens with a warning that circumstances are not what they seem on the surface but are often far more ominous, even dangerous. The father’s Lebanon is grim, but he recognizes possibilities for better lives. The book’s opening poem, “Let me be a lamb in a world that wants my lion,” displays how much one must endure to see that ultimate goal realized: “If someone gives you water, drink. And if they hand you a glass of blood, / tell yourself it’s water.” The narrator speaks of how the father informs daily interactions that mirror her own. She notes, “If I close my eyes, I see my father on the beach, / his hands cupped for water. He says, The dead are always thirsty, // and I wake up in time to catch the L for work that hardly keeps me fed.” Hardship is universal, the speaker implies. How we overcome it is key to defining who we are.

Awad transports us to Lebanon, into the heart of not only conflict but also the impulses behind it. In “Legend of Mount Sannine,” we learn a hard truth: those in the midst of war (especially when against their will) may be beloved to some, “but to the mountains / that whisper and shake, // to the man who places bullets in your hand, / you’re only blood. Blood that spills.” Individuality, stripped away in the violence of war, must be maintained or will quickly flee from those to whom it belongs. “Inheritance” addresses this through the lens of the father, acknowledging how “My father at fifteen walked the unguarded streets / having learned the cadence of rounds, measuring / the distance between safety and crossfire.” Awareness of self, even for personal safety, becomes paramount.

The self, informed by panic and violence for various people throughout these poems, is often reduced to essential components for the sake of survival. In “Shabra and Shatila Massacre,” the inhabitants of a Lebanese town are ravaged by siege. “A woman with half-singed hair runs through the camp, / a single snap, her breath a sizzled wick, / her hair like harp strings the wind plucks.” The tension in this poem is palpable; the woman seems made of it. Here Awad demonstrates her skill at efficient, rich metaphor and simile; the woman is more than just a candlewick or harp string. She is the action taken upon these objects, the sharp, sudden impact. This, we understand, is the evidence of war: transformation of the body and mind into impulse. Awad’s facility with language is evident. Panic and terror are seldom captured so cleanly.

The speaker inhabits the father as persona throughout this collection. “Surah al-Qiyamah: My Father Talks to God When Syria Occupies Tripoli, 1976” shows violence through euphemism that is ultimately more terrifying. “I’m fluent in a new language when I’m this close / to the shopkeeper’s body, his mouth full of red petals,” the speaker recounts. “[They] drip on the counter like a prophecy.” Throughout the violence, the father dreams of a better life in America, one where even the shops are safe.

In later poems the America is depicted in the father’s mental eye. This new country is not without hardship. “Lebanese Famine in America” confronts the hopeful father with a different kind of adversity, a new, more subtle hunger. “It’s not Mount Lebanon’s famine, // picking all those people to bones // . . . my hunger is dust,” the narrator says, continuing:

I push a mop to pay rent,
steal mustard packets
              to dress bread slices,
and tell myself it’s enough
it’s enough it’s enough.

Difficulties for the father are as sharp as hunger pangs, and he carries on only by looking to the future.

Even in America the father is haunted by memories of war, the only Lebanon that comes back to him in the night. This is made clear in “Driftwood,” another poem that makes use of powerful imagery: “When I close my eyes, I am again against the brick / in the plaza on the hill . . . // Missiles smearing above me— / fish scales, platelets of light.” The traumatic memory of a missile attack, multiplied by time, is terrible beyond description, even for he who witnessed it:

How do I tell you about the man
who leaned over a balcony rail and was gone?
It sounded like bees, my small mind pieced together,
when the boot in the courtyard bloated with his foot.

Time and distance help calm these past terrors, but only slightly. The father discusses the lurking horror of unremoved munitions in “On the Unexploded Cluster Bombs in Southern Lebanon,” minimizing them as much as possible but also noting their deceptive nature. “They look like toys, soup cans,” the father remembers, “So you pluck the metal from the tall blades / of yellowing grass and listen.” The bombs, the father tells the narrator, hold far too much, “A land you’ve never seen but one / that remembers you, that grows redder when your hands / like sparrows fly.” This subtle image, innocuous and beautiful at first glance, is violent beyond all reason, and all too real for those who happen upon these live bombs waiting in the landscape.

The close of Set to Music shows the struggle between past and present life, where one often reveals the other, and nothing may be truly whole. In “The Dead Walk Over Your Land,” even kitchen cabinets are the mouth of war, “dishes exposed like teeth.” Even so, Awad affirms that things are different for the better now: not debris but “vines reclaim the windows. / . . . the animals are swimming, your mother is walking, / they are all home, they are all with you.” Set to Music a Wildfire shows what it is to survive, to be as whole as possible, to claim a solid self.

Tyler Robert Sheldon’s newest books are Driving Together (Meadowlark, 2018) and Consolation Prize (Finishing Line, 2018). He received the 2016 Charles E. Walton Essay Award, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Pleiades, Quiddity International Literary Journal, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other venues. He holds an MA in English from Emporia State University, and is an MFA candidate at McNeese State University. He lives in Baton Rouge.