Muneeza Shamsie In a family’s history, a nation’s At the Time of Partition by Moniza Alvi, Bloodaxe Books (Tarset) 2013 pp64 ISBN: 978 1 85224 984 7
The Lahore born, Moniza Alvi, one of Britain’s foremost contemporary poets today, has a new collection At the Time of Partition shortlisted for the 2013 TS Eliot Poetry Prize. The volume consists of twenty poems which flow into each other to create a single haunting and lyrical narrative, welding the personal and the public. The result is a stunning, skilled and controlled work of immense grandeur. Alvi, daughter of a Pakistani father and an English mother, wrote the poems shortly after her startling discovery that her father’s younger brother, brain damaged by a childhood accident, had disappeared at Partition. In 1947, while crossing from Ludhiana to Lahore, Alvi’s widowed grandmother had entrusted him to friends. She never saw him again. Alvi researched Partition compulsively to write about this family episode, drawing on her imagination to recreate incidents and characters, including the grandmother she had never met. Her poems she states are “a version of what might have taken place.” The book begins with newly divided India and leads into newly created Pakistan. In the process it encapsulates many great migrations throughout history: a story of conflict, trauma and loss, followed by adaptation, mutation and change, alongside intangible dreamlike images of memory. 125
