If you’re someone like me, a person who reveres poets and is in awe of the written word, but hesitates to read poetry on her own or is it intimidated by pentameters et al, I invite you to visit with Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s Baker of Tarifa. While it’s difficult to explain the ‘poetry’ in poetry, know that you will lose yourself in Medievil Spain, known
then as the center of Muslim thought, learning and culture as Al-Andulus. This was not just a time for Muslim enlightenment but a time when the world’s three monotheistic religions not only existed peacefully together but set a historical mark in time that we can only aspire to today.

Shadab, who has recently been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize and has worked for 10 years as an editor, is both a rarity and increasingly the norm in emerging Pakistani writers who have found a footing on the international stage. A graduate of Kinnaird College in Lahore and of Reed College where she began a degree in Psychology but ended with an undergraduate degree in English with a focus on Creative Writing, Shadab took the long road home, finally finding her calling and her voice as she landed, a fully formed woman with three young children in tow, to complete her MFA in Poetry at Warren Wilson College. This part of her personal history is worth
telling more because it speaks to our own biases of how poetry finds form, as to how it is actually birthed. It is not found in the silences and melancholy of solitude, but here, in the cacophony and joys of motherhood. And it is this mother that makes her appearance again and again in this book - tending to the oven, laying out measures
for their ingredients, offering succuor and hope and food, blessed, simple, essential, nourishment.

We would do well though not to be lulled into a sense of security, because just as quickly as she nurtures you with her poetry, Shadab, with her immense knowledge of history and her deep personal knowledge of Spain, draws us back to Earth and its sometimes painful stories not through metaphorical gymnastics, but the wonderous and simple strength of the artfully arranged word. The title poem itself is so detailed in it’s imagery, assuring you that “Coals left over from breakfast / will be enough” and then proceeding into particulars that had me tempted to attempt the recipe that followed. But these aren’t simple instructions to bake bread or a retelling of a time when coexistence
in Al-Andulus was and continues to be the standard by which all modern failures can be judged, these are small windows into a world that is painted so vividly and is awash with such a strong sense of time and place that it’s a wonder that Shadab herself is not of that time.

Robert Frost wrote that “writing a poem is discovering”, Shadab Zeest Hashmi has done the discovering for us, it’s for us to now revel in it.