Qeysar Aminpour (Khuzestan)

Dezful (Khuzestan province, Iran) is home to many poets and scholars; as if the spirit of resistance in this city has been injected into its’ youth’s spirit of perseverance. It has streamed the hot years of the south into the “Sudden Mirrors” and “Morning Breath.” Qeysar Aminpour is one of these poets and probably the only poet out of all of the poets of the Islamic Revolution who has won the acceptance of all political orientations. Although he believed in the “Grammar of Love,” the flowers in his poems were always sunflowers! (allusive to Qeysar Aminpour’s work titled “All Flowers are Sunflowers”).

Qeysar was born in 1959. He was the son of a simple villager. Qeysar, who tested all the different forms of poetry, was moderate and abstemious in his work. This moderation in his poems is the characteristic of his poeticness and perhaps his success. Qeysar did not bring about a new style, unlike most of his contemporaries who composed religious and revolutionary poems. Rather, he made every effort in the way of intellectual consistency and the development of his poems and thought; a peaceful thought and a sea-like soul. It is as if the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War have reached pure mysticism in his poems, which has its roots in the literary tolerance of the past ages with history. Qeysar seems to have the pulse of poetry’s times in his hands. When poetry is squirming between the intricacy of styles and writings, he draws on a simple language with a mystical vocabulary, moves away from the language of epic, and with another return to the circle of lyricism and mysticism, gives poetry a distinct gracefulness. It is as if religion has blossomed in his belief. Qeysar’s best poems are his Nimaei poems such as “A Poem for War,” “Lost Notes” and so on. With his trust in Nimaei moderateness in the poetry of the 1980s and 1990s and an aware return to a kind of intellectual and spiritual balance in poetry, he placed his name among the best of revolutionary poetry. Nevertheless, Qeysar’s classic poems, short verses, and even the researches he left behind cannot be overlooked; each is an innovation in its own literary style.

If we are all yellow and withered

But we have not surrendered to autumn

Like the empty flower pot by the window

We are full of cracked memories

If there were sorrows, we have witnessed them

If there were pains, we have taken them

If the heart is witness, we have brought it

If a scar is the condition, we have borne it

Qeysar Aminpour departed this world in 2007 after a period of illness.