Has any city been so cursed by history and so blessed in its poets as Baghdad? Reuven Snir, a scholar with family roots in Baghdad’s Jewish community, has edited and translated Baghdad: The City in Verse, an anthology of poems from the eighth century to the present…There are poems of debauchery (‘Baghdad is not an abode for hermits,’ an early poet warns his readers), nostalgia, and lament. The mournful note is especially strong in the later poems. But it is already there in Ishaq al-Khuraymi’s ‘Elegy for Baghdad,’ a lament written in the aftermath of a civil war, which remembers a city ‘surrounded by vineyards, palm trees, and basil,’ but now sees a wasteland of widows and dry wells, with ‘the city split into groups, / the connections between them cut off.’ The Mongol invasion of 1258, when tradition says the Tigris ran black with the ink of books and red with the blood of scholars, was still four hundred years away. (Robyn Creswell Paris Review online 2013-10-18)