Comments and reviews
Shabbir
Banoobhai’s poetry is spiritual, political and personal with the three themes
interwoven, the personal poems often having a political dimension and the
political, a spiritual. Readers of his poetry underestimate the extent to which
social and political issues influence his work, but it is his mystical poetry
which is most extraordinary.
A
child of parents who came to
He has
also identified with the victims of oppressive regimes elsewhere, including in
the Balkans at the beginning of the 90s. In 1992 he accompanied a journalist-friend
on a mission to
Perhaps influenced by South African society, his
writing has become more and more clearly directed against narrow-minded and
exclusive religious thinking. This writing may be found on his website: — www.veilsoflight.com.
What is particularly striking about his poetry is its
complete sincerity. He is able to use the big words — words and concepts which
many poets would hesitate to use because they seem to have lost their newness;
but he is able to restore not just their freshness, but something like their
full resonance — the fullness of their meaning. This requires an unusual
technical and emotional solidity and wholeness of purpose, both a lack of
ostentation and a lack of hesitation. At the same time the perceptive reader is
always aware of their subtlety, humanity and warmth.
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Douglas Livingstone
On echoes of my other self
I first came to know Shabbir through his poems …
struck by the clean simplistic line he generally favoured. But the simplicity was deceptive: he made
each word (a sign of the true poet) carry great emotional and intellectual
weight.
Almost every line of the work was subliminally
ignited by the ancient great Islamic poets …an obsessive and talented poet, a
precocious master of the Word and a fine lyricist to boot…he shares their prime
qualities: sensuality, passion, brilliance of imagery, irony and Man’s estate,
a holistic approach to nature, and of course, love of God…
Knowing Shabbir Banoobhai, the man through his
work, can illuminate something of the unknown.
Here, then, is a further asset to and aspect of,
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Professor Colin Gardner,
On echoes of my other self
The volume contains pieces on a variety of themes — religious poems, love poems,
philosophical poems, poems of social and political concern. Through all of them one senses the poet’s
personality — sensitive,
meditative, scrupulous, passionate, humane.
Banoobhai’s apprehension of society and its pains
and injustices is grounded, then, in an impassioned sense of the possibilities
of human expansion and human relationships.
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Eve Horwitz, University of
the
On shadows of a sun-darkened land
Shabbir Banoobhai
again gives us poems of an intense yet simple lyricism…
The simplicity of Banoobhai’s poetry is
deceptive. His language is simple, his
words chosen with an almost austere delicacy. The meaning of his poems is immediately
accessible and the emotional appeal direct.
His images are the universal ones of land, sea and sky, used with a
Biblical economy of detail.
Yet the meaning of these poems often has a
profundity that yields ever-widening rings of understanding, like a stone
thrown into still water.
Banoobhai’s strength lies in this combination of
simplicity and universality…
Perhaps the most outstanding feature of Banoobhai’s
poetry, however, is that this strongly-felt writing is infused with such clear
intelligence … so that feelings become intelligence, and intelligence, feeling…
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Douglas Livingstone
On shadows of a sun-darkened land
A fine second collection. I like every poem in it — practically every word in it.
There can no longer be any doubt you are the
most superb exponent of ‘minimal art’ poetically; certainly the best in the
world at the game since Sappho (of
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Kobus Moolman,
On inward moon outward sun
In the body of South African writing, Banoobhai’s is amongst a handful
of voices with the courage to articulate a contemporary spirituality and the
artistic skill to do so convincingly. The utmost simplicity of expression is
used to conceal and reveal, at one and the same time, ideas of intense
profundity. The poems are often meditative songs of love, longing and loss in a
mystical world but as often remain rooted in the social and political struggles
of this world.
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Joan Metelerkamp,
On book of songs
There are very few book-length
sequences of poems and it excites me to encounter this form in the work of a
well-known South African poet. To sustain a cycle of poems is to begin to
dismantle the barriers between a novel or short story and poetry.
In book of songs Shabbir Banoobhai takes a position that requires
daring combined with humility – there is no rhetoric, no propaganda, but also
no slinking away, no hiding in the suburbs of language, no shrinking from an
encounter with mystery. A meditative cycle like this one reminds us of our
common thirst for love and meaning.
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Dr. Sa’diyya Shaikh,
On
if i could write
if
i could write is a luminous work of the heart containing profound reflections on the
nature of the Divine, Prophetic and human consciousness, love, justice, peace
and war. A genuine and original Sufi primer for the 21st-century seeker,
reflecting an important development in contemporary South African
spiritual thought, it is both a treasury of wisdom and a hands-on
learning manual for our times.
Speaking the universal language of love, in a
series of tender letters to his daughters engaging the personal and
public realms of human existence, Shabbir Banoobhai unravels
humanity’s highest spiritual dimensions to those who are willing to hear — who seek to become what the
Qur'an describes as ‘people who have a centre’.
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Professor Michael
Chapman,
On lyrics in paradise
A wise, distinctive voice; powerful, pure poetry.
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