The mirror of my heart : a thousand years of Persian poetry by women
(Book)

I gaze into the mirror of my heart, / And though it's me who looks, it's you I see. So speaks one of the many distinctive voices in this new anthology of verse by women poets writing in Persian, most of whom have never been translated into English before; this is especially true of the pre-modern poets, such as the unnamed author of the lines above, known simply as the "daughter of Salar" or "the woman from Esfahan." One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe eh, who lived over a thousand years ago) and there have been women poets writing in Persian in virtually every generation since that time until the present. Before the twentieth century they tended to come from society's social extremes. Many were princesses, a good number were hired entertainers of one kind or another, and they were active in many different countries Iran of course, but also India, Afghanistan, and areas of central Asia that are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Not surprisingly, a lot of their poetry sounds like that of their male counterparts, but a lot doesn't; there are distinctively bawdy and flirtatious poems by medieval women poets, poems from virtually every era in which the poet complains about her husband (sometimes light-heartedly, sometimes with poignant seriousness), touching poems on the death of a child, and many epigrams centered on little details that bring a life from hundreds of years ago vividly before our eyes. In the nineteenth century we begin to see political poems, often very angry ones, by women demanding both the independence of Middle-Eastern countries from Western governments and women s emancipation.Perhaps the most personal and intensely emotional poems are those of the last hundred years, in which we see local sensibilities rooted in a millennium of literary and social tradition responding to, and embracing or rejecting, the myriad multi-cultural strands that make up the modern world. -- from Amazon.