Saba Syed Razvi

Heliophobia is a mysterious collection of mythological fantasy poems. Some of the lines were quite compelling to me:
“Your body, lost but for them / not bullet-ridden, but studded / with pearls, sprouting moons, shimmering / the holes in your skin”
“In bed, I place a slip of jade beneath / the eyelids / to dull the ample edge of dreaming”
There are themes here of womanhood, the feminine divine, ocean and sea, mythology, but I felt unmoored while reading these somewhat inaccessible, ephemeral, non-narrative, and non-linear selections. There is an emotional undertow here but what it represents I cannot be sure. In some places the poems’ referential quality guides the reader, in others I was thrown off. For example, I expected the poem about Goya’s Black Paintings to be more about the context of those works.
Sometimes the poems seem speculative, but as a whole I would call this a book of poems which skirts the boundaries of the fantastic instead of finding its way into the center of that country of shadows and setting up shop.
Not an easy book to sink your teeth into, a bit like falling into a dream only to find you may never wake again.… (altro)