by Nicole Yurcaba
According to ABC News, the number of displaced children globally “reached a record 43.3 million” at the end of 2022. In the last decade, this number has nearly doubled, and Russia’s current war in Ukraine has forced over two million Ukrainian children to flee the country and left another one million children internally displaced. Other events, like extreme weather, have led to another set of significant displacements, particularly in the Horn of Africa and Pakistan. A mere eight years old when the Iran-Iraq War began and in senior high when it ended, Tofangchi knows too well the effects war has on children. Thus, poetry collections like Pantea Amin Tofangchi’s Glazed With War become essential reading. Glazed With War, told from a child’s perspective, depicts war, death, confusion, beauty, and hatred.
“I Wish We Didn’t Have Oil,” told from the speaker’s grandfather’s perspective, is one of the collection’s more overtly political poems. However, despite its subtle political commentary, it holds a deep message about interconnectedness. The poem opens with the grandfather’s assertion “There is no such thing / as an easy country.” The imagery alludes to the assertion that oil played a significant part in the Iran-Iraq War. Nonetheless, the grandfather creates a global picture for the speaker, suggesting that even countries without those types of resources “live in fear” of “those who have” because “we depend on one another.” More significantly, the speaker makes a profound observation regarding their relationship with the grandfather: “He discussed the war with me / treated me as an adult.” In this line, the speaker exhibits a maturity, a precociousness, and a keen awareness clearly developed because of their exposure to war’s violence. These developmental attributes appear in other poems like “My Transparent Roots.”
“My Transparent Roots” is an intimate poem, one in which readers are transported to “days that left me / with too many questions.” The poem’s simple form and direct language echo the speaker’s sense of upheaval and rootlessness. The rootlessness emerges as “questions” that the speaker “either forgot / or gave up, / or learned to” embody. The poem shifts powerfully as it concludes. In the final four lines, a child’s imagination overrides the brutality with which they live each day, and the speaker imagines what it would be like to exist as a tree. The speaker admits, “I would treasure my roots” and asks “had I been a tree, / would I have ever wanted to leave?” The final question embodies the speaker’s sense of not belonging fused with an acceptance of their circumstances.
“The Same New Day” reads like a defiant manifesto of survival. The phrase “War didn’t stop” repeats four times in the first stanza, and the repetition reiterates the cycles of war and existence. Following the phrase are expressions like “us from wanting a new doll,” “us from having birthday parties,” and “me from wanting another baby sister or brother.” These expressions not only communicate childhood innocence, but also convey an affirmation that despite the war’s encroachment on daily lives, people will find a way to persevere. The lines balance the war with collective desires, and the lines’ simplicity implies the tenuous balance between war and domestic life.
Concluding the collection is the poignant, relevant poem “Flight 655–The End.” The title alludes to Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian jet airliner shot down by US missiles on July 3, 1988. All 290 passengers, including 66 children, were killed. In the powerful opening stanza, the speaker asserts, “That war was not a mistake. This war isn’t either.” The speaker’s utilization of the words “this” and “that” establish a comparison, but they also create a sense of continuity, one that communicates war’s inevitability. The inevitability develops even more when the speaker describes war as a “necessity / to sell guns” and predicts “Bombs will continue.” Nonetheless, the defiance created in poems like “The Same New Day” continues when the speaker takes a stand: “As an adult, / I refuse to accept it!” This moment of resistance acts as a dramatic shift, one that leads to comforting images of birds flying high, tomatoes ripening, and the speaker’s remembrance of “skinny Persian cucumbers,” “Tabriz salty cheese,” and “the smell of saffron rice from my mom’s kitchen.”
In the book’s introduction, writer and immigrant Judith Krummeck poses, “How does a child live through something as devastating as war? How does a child live through any trauma?” Krummeck asserts, “Quite simply, she lives.” Utilizing minimalist forms and simple language, Tofangchi captures everything from terrifying missile strikes to mundane walks home from school. Accompanying the poems are pencil sketches, which express a range of emotions and experiences, ranging from parental love and support to fighter jets flying above a group of children playing . While the collection conveys personal, familial, cultural, and even materialistic loss, loss and hopelessness are not its inherent themes. Rather, the poems and artwork remind readers that “the war didn’t stop either,” but neither did life.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба–Nikola Yurtsaba) is a Ukrainian (Hutsul/Lemko) American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, West Trade Review, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and is a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and The Southern Review of Books.
