The Pomegranates of Kandahar

Sarah Maguire’s rich and lyrical poems have been highly praised for the ease with which they ground precise, sensual detail within the wider context of world events. In this remarkable new collection, her poems travel greater distances than ever before.

The title poem laments the devastation visited upon Afghanistan following decades of war. Other poems consider the casualties of political unrest: would-be migrants in Tangiers gazing northwards at the longed-for phantasmagoria of ‘Europe’; and packs of wolves on the loose in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. But there are intimate poems too, often using scientific vocabularies to offset a personal moment, as in ‘Landscape, with Dead Sea’ where the erosion of the poet’s skin is connected to geological transformations at the earth’s core.