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“NOT the five Books of Moses./Not the five wounds of Christ./Not the five pillars of Islam. These don’t cause me sleepless nights./No, I lie awake thinking/how a widow with five/mouths to feed will survive/on only stones for bread.”
Those lines are from Playing the Ghost of Maimonides (Bloodaxe, £9.95), Guyanese poet John Agard’s most ambitious book yet and a wholly original take on the endless wars of the 21st century.
Maimonides was a 12th-century Spanish-born rabbi who argued for the indivisibility of God and the unity of all religious faiths. Influential in Jewish, Muslim and Christian philosophy, he once wrote a “guide for the perplexed” in Judeo-Arabic.
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