The Rule of Three is Fareh Iqbal’s third collection of poetry, following About a Girl and A Lady of Letters. The poems were written during the 2020 COVID lockdown, and the Three in the title refers to underlying themes of love, loss and redemption.
The poems were shorter than those found in the earlier collections, yet still commanded multiple rereads as I am wont to say that one should never rush through poetry. Rereads promote enlightenment and the discovery of nuance, and I was happy to have engaged myself longer over the text in order to immerse myself in the blossoming imagery.
I especially liked “The Flame”, about an unrequited love, and its rhyming of name with flame. The same pleasant end-of-stanza rhyming occurs in “Confession”, with course and remorse. In “Syllables”, Iqbal sums up in four short lines the passion one has for the name of one’s lover. The three syllables alluded to in the third line are mirrored in the final line, which is three syllables long. Yet the love expressed by these three syllables turns to loss in “Defeat”:
Defeat tastes like ashes in my mouth
where your name once resided
fragments of three syllables
lie heavily on my tongue
tainting the space for another
to make a home.
Astrology played a role in the compostion of some poems, as the sign of Pisces was predominant in three of them: “Pisces”, “Elixir” and “Venus in Pisces”.
The collection had an inauspicious start, as the very first poem (untitled) started out with the poetic no-no There is… and also included the misspelled chorous for chorus. Iqbal would also use chorous [sic] in a later poem called “Overture”.
Iqbal erred by using the incorrect verb lays when she meant to say lies in “Frayed Hours”:
she lays contemplating
In later poems, however, such as “Levitate”, and untitled poems on pages 76 and 90 she gets the lay/lay/lies verbs right.
COVID turns up in five poems near the end, thus in the redemption segment, in titles such as “Mercy”, “Social Distancing”, “Lockdown”, “Quarantine” and “Blueprints”.
I had a particular fondness for “False Gods”, a poem about the umbilical and almost cultlike attachment people have to their cellphones. Iqbal likened the plastic screens to broken talismans and hereditary rosary beads, bleeding one’s thoughts of battery life.