Description
‘How much iron/ does the human body have?’ asks Ammar Aziz, convening The Missing Prayer as equal parts body and map. Uncrumple the map and write in the creases that paper makes. Like an exquisite corpse, what follows each crease might be information, intense somatic data, or conversely: “fragments,” “ugly pathways,” “melody…beyond matter.” In this way, the book evokes design as a mode of recognition between bodies and landscapes that are contiguous, yet formally and often painfully unknown. — Bhanu Kapil
Informed, philosophical, at times indignant and humorous at others, laughing at the divides we humans create to our own peril, these poems deal with a wide range of themes and emotions- from the diverse ragas of Hindustani music and the indescribable charm of Urdu language to the patient mujawar and the missing prayer mat, a musician’s murder, and a communist’s will, from lust and seduction to kleptomania and genocide, all with a kind of detachment so rare in poets. Rich in thought and imagery, Makhdoom Ammar Aziz’s poems stand apart from the mainstream of English poetry written by the poets of the subcontinent. — K. Satchidanandan
I continued to marvel at the precision with which Aziz uses even the simplest words to turn them into poetry. Whether the poems I read are longish, like ‘The Dargah at Night’ or short, like ‘Two Women’ and ‘Lust’, or those filled with emotion, like ‘This mud is our foremothers’ blood’ and ‘We burst into tears’, that precision was there. I greatly enjoyed reading the book; it brought me fresh news and fresh air from across the border. — Adil Jussawalla
Ammar gives us an intimate history of objects that is possible only in the best kind of poems: a pan, a ‘dim yellow bulb’, a ‘twenty rupee note’, dead batteries, a prayer mat, beads, wood, ittar, skin, all of these on their way to martyrdom. These are poems whose afterlife is like – to borrow a metaphor from Ammar – ‘chaashni’, or ‘a dreamy state of slumber while still awake’. — Sumana Roy
Aziz chronicles the extraordinary and the mundane with a sensibility that straddles both tradition and modernity. One can glimpse in these poems the full range of the poet’s voice, exploring moods, ideas, and moments and carving out their inherent poetry. — Musharraf Ali Farooqi
Ammar Aziz is a poet and filmmaker from Lahore. His poetry—widely published and anthologised—has been translated into Russian, Spanish, Bangla, Tamil, Kannada, and Urdu. He has participated in several literature festivals and artist residencies, including a writer-in-residence fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude, and was recently accepted into the University of East Anglia’s Master’s program in Creative Writing. As a filmmaker, his acclaimed feature-length documentaries, A Walnut Tree and Discount Workers, have been showcased at major film festivals around the world. His work has earned accolades such as the FIPRESCI Award, the Grand Prix at the Moscow International Documentary Film Festival, and the Prix Monde en Regards at the Jean Rouch International Film Festival. The Missing Prayer is his debut poetry collection.
Reviews
An excerpt from ‘The Missing Prayer,’ by Ammar Aziz in Scroll.in
Mariam Tahir Butt in The Friday Times
In his debut poetry collection, The Missing Prayer, poet, filmmaker and literary translator Ammar Aziz sifts through the overlooked and the ordinary, unearthing hidden depths, buried memories, and the weight of the unsaid. There is a natural knack for finding prompts in the most unlikely places to cast the world anew. Consider the poem where his mother’s message, written with the help of AI, has the poet “orphaned without her Urdu / homeless without her typos,” or when battling insomnia in another country he realises he is “not used to ceilings without fans.” If Aziz has a skill for conveying profound ideas with ease, at other times, he uncovers profundity in the seemingly mundane: “in my mother’s garden / a city grows in a pot / she reminisces about Kabul / looking at its ruins.” Or when referring to “the Temple Road / where there’s no temple anymore,” or simply “you wonder / if each night has her own ritual / her own grief.”
Qurat Ul Ain Khalil in The News
The poet’s use of indigenous idioms serves as a soulful thread weaving together the past and present, carrying the essence of culture across time. These expressions are more than mere words – they are echoes of history, preserving the spirit of a people in the most intimate and heartfelt way. His skill lies in conveying profound ideas with an exemplary command of language and a masterful economy of words. The Missing Prayer subtly challenges patriarchal norms, making the reading experience both thought-provoking and deeply engaging. The poet’s skilful comparison and contrast of nature with the feminine is particularly commendable, as his poems seem to grow organically from natural elements, which serve as powerful symbols and metaphors.
Kabir Deb in Outlook India
Sufism has always been associated with peace. It is spoken about in peace conventions and held close to God. But mostly people forget how intensely the genre is related to protest and anarchy. The peace that comes out as a consequence is mostly glorified since it becomes trendy for those who want to dissociate themselves from reality. Ammar Aziz’s collection of poems The Missing Prayer, is a document that dissents by ingesting darkness and throwing towards us a light which has the capacity to diminish our vulnerabilities. The book underlines various issues which keep on happening around us, but we leave them ignored since they come from the hands of establishment. Here, the idea of peace is vastly different from what is inscribed in the moral textbooks of society.
Mariya Anum in Scroll.in
Ammar Aziz’s debut book of poetry, The Missing Prayer, is a delightfully haunting original voice. While constantly turning the mundane into magical, this collection of poems offers an array of refreshingly impressionistic verses. With evocative, painterly language, Aziz delivers graphic details in totality: “You pass by crushed houses / and hear them speak”. Be it Hoshiarpur “with mango orchards/ where spring never died” or swaying sugarcane fields, “in a soft breeze/ and men slowly sip tea/ squatting under the old banyan tree,” the stanzas resemble miniature paintings.
