Overview

Maryam Daftari is a poet, pianist, and award-winning nature photographer with a 30-year career as a political science lecturer and China specialist. Her poetry, Embrace the Dawn, was a 2026 Pushcart Prize nominee and her work is frequently featured in the San Diego Poetry Annual and Lyrical Iowa. She is the author of four collections, including Kintsugi: Poems of Hope and Healing, and won first place in the 2024 Iowa Poetry Association competition for her work in the ghazal style.

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9781421835983

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Reviews

Poetry has always been a synesthetic experience-at its best, bringing together seeing, hearing, tuning, mirroring, echoing, breathing. Maryam Daftari in this book has brought it all back together. It's an expression of the beautifully random old origin of poetry and its future too. She finds beauty and consolation in constraint. An avant-garde in traditional attention. Paradoxically, for her, constraint is freedom. We see stones lying around, nice but messageless. She sees ""rock-dancing,"" a ""profound script,"" ""cosmic swirls,"" ""a whisper of identity,"" and always ""a heart nearby."" Al Filreis Kelly Professor, University of Pennsylvania Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House Dir., Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) Co-Director, PennSound Publisher, Jacket2 Teacher/convener, ModPo Producer/host, PoemTalk The poet Maryam Daftari has assembled yet another fascinating set of zen-imbued stanzas and poetic vignettes in a follow-up of sorts to her previous collection Kintsugi: Poems of Hope & Healing, a favorite read of mine from a little over a year ago. Instead of gold-filled cracks, the author's new ""poetic weavings"" are ekphrastic in nature, the source being dozens upon dozens of painted and inscribed stones, collected on a California beach by the local community. The throughlines with her earlier kintsugi poems are evident after a quick glance at the Table of Contents, where certain threads intertwine the two books together; chief among these are nature's call to poets, whether in a garden setting or in wild places... as well as the subsequent spiritual healing which occurs from creating within the natural world. All of this in turn leads to an undeniable resilience of heart, mind and body inspired through these poems and their accompanying photographs taken at this sanctuary of messages from strangers, all written on beach stones! Could there be a more Daoist expression of humanity's need for interpersonal connection? This reader thinks not, and looks forward to discovering more universal insights within the author's exquisitely numinous poems. Robt O'Sullivan Schleith: host of Poets INC (Escondido Arts Partnership)

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