The Ishtar Gate

by Sarah Corbett

ISBN: 9781836244578

Published: 2025-04-28

Self and history collide, selves fracture, the flag is divided, monuments collapse. In her sixth collection, Sarah Corbett considers the fragments we might hold against dissolution, whether personal, national, or global. Midnight in Leningrad, 1940, Anna Akhmatova waits for a poem to arrive, in her hand an egg; on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a writer recalls her breakdown as a student in 1989. In the pandemic year an isolated artist communes with a tree; visitors to an art gallery are led on a journey of rebirth; missives find their way back to us from a flooded world. The book opens with an invocation to the goddess Ishtar, and closes with the goddess rising from a spring thirty years in the future, 'the world's unspoken desire' to be reborn. A series of ekphrastic 'interventions' respond to 20th century European cinema, the work of Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic, and consider what art can offer in face of the predicaments we find ourselves...