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Have an informed opinion ran the slogan in the chain-bookstore display above a

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"Have an informed opinion," ran the slogan in the chain-bookstore display above a selection of newish titles about "Bush, Blair and Iraq". Now an advocate of "regime change", the Iraqi Kurdish exile Kanan Makiya (aka "Samir al-Khalil") revealed the hubristic horror of Saddam's rule more than a dozen years ago in The Monument and Republic of Fear. Since then, the long-suffering prey of bombers and Ba'athists have been argued over, rather than argued with, across a thousand learned volumes.All the more welcome, then, that the remarkable book-length journal Modern Poetry in Translation should have chosen this week to release its survey of Iraqi Poetry Today (published from King's College London, at £9.95; or via Central Books on 0845 458 9911). MPT has a rare and precious talent for illuminating the world's more perplexing places in a blaze of verse – recent issues include a pioneering collection of Palestinian and Israeli Poetry.Guest edited by Saadi Simawe, Iraqi Poetry Today gathers work from from 40 living or recently-deceased writers, with Jewish and Kurdish as well as Arab voices. Inevitably, only a handful of the poets now live in Iraq; otherwise, places of exile stretch from Geneva to Harvard.This is a yearning, wounded literature of resistance, remembrance and survival, of secret truths told at home and lonely insights honed abroad Wistful and wry tones prevail.

Neither gung-ho Western liberators nor Third World sentimentalists will find any comfort here. These writers loathe dictatorship, which they curse with a fine rhetorical glee; equally, they mourn the guiltless victims of war and blockade "Santa Claus ... comes in military uniform," laments the Baghdad-born, Detroit-based Dunya Mikhail, "and every year distributes to us/ some red swords/ toys for orphans/ artificial legs/ and photos of absentees/ to be hung on the walls". There are many poems here which have the power to alter the emotional flight-path of hawks and doves alike. Literature complicates matters mightily.I thought, repeatedly, of Joyce's prescription for the displaced author: "Silence, exile and cunning".

Except that Joyce chose that rebel trinity; but these Iraqi poets had it chosen for them. "Baghdad died of a wound from within," rages "The City ravaged by Silence" from Bulland al-Haydari (one of the real revelations here), "From a blind silence that paralysed the tongues of its children."Iraqi Poetry Today reanimates the clich?hat calls any invaluable work with doubtful prospects "a labour of love". As Saadi Sadawe writes in his moving preface, "Translating Iraqi poetry and publishing it in English had become for me a desperate effort to save what remains of Iraqi humanity and culture in the face of a brutal dictatorship and war" His effort succeeds, gloriously. "Although I lost faith in politics long ago," Simawe concludes, "I still believe in the power of the word" We should try to share his hope.. After a lifetime of creating fiction, deliberately sitting down each morning to make stuff up, Frederic Raphael at 72 has taken up truth-telling. Following his recent account of scripting Eyes Wide Shut for Stanley Kubrick, this month he publishes a memoir of his childhood: A Spoilt Boy (Orion, £12.99).

So how accurate can it be? "My son Stephen," says Raphael, "said how can you remember the initials of the people you were at school with? To which I'm afraid the answer is, well unfortunately how can I not remember them – they are linked to their initials. And I can see them all, even though they were all children, and I see that, yet I still see them as dangerous to me now as they were then."The anti-Semitic bullying to which he was subjected by teachers and boys in his English public school is the background to the story. The overt bullying – racist jibes and being "frozen out" – could have driven a child, let alone a hyper-sensitive only son, to suicide It made Raphael grab a pen – a way of getting even. The covert anti-Semitism (as he is rejected for school places he should have been given, because of his Jewishness) he recognises, even though he is so young. So it doesn't succeed in leaving him unsure of his ability.This self-confidence makes him quite brave. At the end of A Spoilt Boy, Raphael describes the evening a visiting preacher cracked an anti-Semitic joke while speaking to the boys in chapel (which Raphael, an unaffiliated Jew, attends regularly).

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