The hermit-poet of modern Persian literature, Bijan Elahi (1945-2010) was a modernist poet, a prolific translator of Eliot, Rimbaud, Michaux, Hölderlin, and the founder of Other Poetry, the leading avant-garde movement within Persian modernism. Elahi passed the last three decades of his life in seclusion in his house in Tehran. He stopped publishing poems and never appeared in public following his official retreat. However, a new generation of Iranian poets revived Elahi’s legacy as a poet and a translator as part of their search for new modes of expression and experimentation with language. High Tide of the Eyes translates Elahi’s most important poems, as gathered together in two posthumously published volumes, Vision (2014) and Youths (2015), into English. High Tide of the Eyes will be the first to introduce a key voice in Persian literary modernism to an Anglophone audience.

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reviews:

“This is poetry of the highest order, that speaks to the spirit as well as the body, and speaks to them sometimes as if they were one. Elahi is a modern metaphysical – a modernist metaphysical – but he never forgets that the sense must live as well, and that the poem must communicate its complexities through the clarity of a language that has been distilled to its clearest, sharpest form. These lines soar lyrically, and yet they are held down by the poet’s concern with the world as we live it. These poems come through beautifully into English – not just because his translators are so skillful and creative in their approach, but because they love his work and want to share it with new readers in ways that make the poems live anew in the English language.”
–Patrick McGuinness (poet and professor of literature, Oxford University)