Hafiz in London

What if Hafiz, the great 14th-century Persian poet of wine and longing, found himself adrift in fog-shrouded Victorian London? This is the audacious premise of Justin H. McCarthy's 1886 collection, which imagines the ancient master of the ghazal navigating the gray streets of Empire while his heart remains in Shiraz. The poems ache with displacement: Hafiz remembers pomegranate trees and southern seas while rain pounds his London windows. He revisits past loves with the same lyrical fire he brought to the Divan, but now shadows of age and exile deepen every stanza. McCarthy weaves Persian imagery into English forms with surprising grace, creating a voice both ancient and startlingly modern in its loneliness. The collection works not because it solves the tension between East and West, but because it refuses to resolve it. This is poetry about the ache of betweenness, the particular grief of the exile who carries their homeland everywhere and nowhere.