A Week in Books: Where are the Iraqi voices?

"Have an informed opinion," ran the slogan in the chain-bookstore display above a selection of newish titles about "Bush, Blair and Iraq". This was imaginative, educative retailing, free of gimmicks and rich in intellectual nourishment. Yet something about it still rankled. This rack of very well informed opinions came from British investigative reporters, French media philosophers, American policy-wonks – most recently, the ex-State Department analyst Robert Kagan, whose much-cited essay Paradise and Power (Atlantic Books, £10) instructs sybaritic Europeans to get real and assume that "we have only just entered a long era of American hegemony".

But where were the Iraqi voices? Only a few have played any role in the published debate. 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 cliché that 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.