What is poetry in the face of war?

“In the particular is the universal,” said James Joyce. In Forest of Noise, the particular is the Israel-Hamas war and the suffering of the Gazans, as recorded by the award-winning poet Mosab Abu Toha. He told his harrowing story of capture by the Israel Defense Forces and eventual release in the New Yorker, and one of the poems in this collection retells that story. Abu Toha is writing about particulars, and those details appear in the titles of many of his poems: “Gaza Notebook (2021–2022),” “Gazan Family Letters, 2092,” “What a Gazan Should Do during an Israeli Air Strike,” “What a Gazan Mother Does during an Israeli Night Air Strike,” “To My Mother, Staying in an UNRWA School Shelter in the Jabalia Camp.”

When I read these poems, however, I see beyond Gaza. I see Dresden and Ukraine and Poland and Israel. I see it all: Darfur and Rwanda, Sudan, the Uyghurs, and every concentration camp from World War II. Tolstoy once observed that all happy families are alike and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Yet here in these poems, one can see all global unhappiness in the particulars of the suffering of one people. Here, it seems, all unhappy families are alike. Suffering, of course, is always personal. And it is relentlessly, tragically universal.

The images in Abu Toha’s poems are graphic: “children play soccer / on the beach / they are eight / eight bombs thump the field / four kids killed.” In a prose poem, a young man pulls a suitcase behind him. Inside the case are clothes from his family, killed in an air strike. “The suitcase is their new home and I want to put it in a safe place,” he says. In another poem, a mother gathers her children around her at night: