‘The History of the Veil’ again explores objectification of the other, delineating how women have historically been seen by men as other, to be clothed or unclothed according to which government, religion, or ideology prevailed. Alizadeh observes that men’s prescribing of women’s clothing implies ‘once again Eve’s daughters / plotting man’s Fall’. Although the meaning throughout is occasionally cloudy, the poem ridicules men’s attempts at control while also stressing that varying restrictions upon women are not limited to Islamic fundamentalism – ‘we’ll do anything to prove our power over reality, altering // the shape of the body; covering it by force here, uncovering it / by force there: woman will / not wear the veil un / happily ever after.’

When the poet focuses on impassioned, often controversial, argument, the poems become too insistent, and in some of the autobiographical ones the language is less restrained. Mostly, though, Alizadeh’s poems carefully protest and witness, and, at their best, resist overstatement;

There I was
suspected of perfidy to the Faith, an
Infidel

-wannabe. Over here I am suspected
of terror, Our values’ covert enemy.
My likes

don’t belong to tribes, nations, et al; but
welcome at the cells of the Islamic
Republic’s

Evin Prison, pliers pinching their finger
-nails; or sleep-deprived and hooded
indefinitely

in the dark solitaries of Guantanamo Bay.
(‘The Suspect’)

Ashes in the Air is also a journey of self-discovery in which the poet learns that he too is prejudiced towards difference. One poem, ‘Our Democracy’, parodies Australian complacency and patriotism, with a faint echo of Gilbert and Sullivan – ‘No, that’s not a Cross / on our blessed national flag. It’s an icon of our // heavenly British heritage. We’re not / like Muslim fanatics. We’re a fully modern, // unquestionably secular democracy’ – while, in another poem set in China, the poet complains: ‘Outside the sadistic // cacophony of fireworks continues / announcing the Year of an Animal. Today’s // superpower smokes the atmosphere, kills / Iraqis ... Will / Chinese world domination be any less // crass?’ The casual non-specificity of ‘Animal’ marks the foreigner’s dismissiveness.

Alizadeh writes entirely in unrhymed couplets, influenced by the traditional Persian ghazal. He has also translated Attar, the twelfth-century Persian poet (Fifty Poems of Attar, with Kenneth Avery, 2007). His work is driven by an incessant musicality of concordant vowels and consonants, with shards of untethered rhymes often sculpting the poems. The strongest poems achieve a sonorous definitiveness, especially ‘Joan of Arc’, ‘Politkovskaya’, ‘Attar’, and ‘Robespierre’, the first three not dramatic monologues but speculations on the impact of language: that is, the protagonists are defined by their words.

... You wrote, fumed, defamed the brutes,

have now been found inside a rusty
elevator
with bullets in your head ...

... It’s over. Forget Pushkin,

Akhmatova, Pasternak, Yevtushenko.
Today
only you matter; you, Russia’s only true
poet.
(‘Politkovskaya’)

Each poem ends with the subject’s death resulting in some way from his or her words, so identity is both created and obliterated by language. These poems are followed by the equally assured ‘The Volunteer’, where a would-be warrior participates in a foreign war, and ‘Spiritus Mundi’, with its title and epigraph from Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, but describes a less abstract vision: ‘Did it really / slouch, or was it more of a meandering // sleepwalk? Its unambiguous / movement did not at all emulate // the rigor mortis of the labourer / in Dubai, jobless, penniless, self-hanged // from a streetlight in the twilight / of globalisation.’ Images of death and near-death experiences dominate the book’s last six poems: in ‘Sky Burial’, the poet imagines his corpse devoured by vultures, and in both the eerie, almost epiphanic, ‘The Brink’ and ‘The Truth About Pain’, death is narrowly avoided. In the book’s final poem, the poet in Istanbul learns via email of a friend’s death, thus underlining one constant theme of language as truth-bearer. Ashes in the Air is a type of odyssey from Iran to Australia, from youth to maturity, from birth to death, and signals Alizadeh’s continued poetic development.