In Couplets

Andrew Staniland's "In Couplets" is a sequence of poems in long, stepped couplets. It starts in London in the autumn of 2020, in lockdown from the Covid pandemic, with protests in Belarus and war in Nagorno-Karabakh. It continues through 2021, with a summer of floods and fires and the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, and ends in the spring of 2022, with Russia's assault on Ukraine. There is also a set of ten English ghazals and two series of aphorisms, one prompted by Babur's "Baburnama", the other by Sa'di's "Gulistan".