Reza Parchizadeh

Thankless Toil: My Old Poems Revisited Reza Parchizadeh

This is my little book of experimental poetry and also the first book I ever published, as well as my first book that was banned by the authorities of the Islamic Republic; so it was the first in quite a number of things! Full of ideas, this bricolage shows something of my epistemological fascination with Borges and Foucault, with a pinch of Housman's morbid reticence, which all in all pushed me to take up the Songs attributed to Xayyam later on. The subject matters being so diverse, the sole factor that brings the isolated poems together is experimentation itself, which arises from my perpetual concern with writing as a consciously continuous move toward the intensification of the theme plus the distinction of the style. As such, it is a curious combination of staticism and dynamism that I neither know how nor want to reconcile! In the end, I must confess that after all these years when I came to revise the book for this second edition, I surprisingly found myself still liking it!