Compensation in Hawkar Kalary’s Your Knitted Scarf: Transcendentalism and Confronting Loss

Abstract

Poetry has often been misunderstood to be exclusive to the few elite. However, magnificent talents keep surfacing, and such talents are certainly worth the research focus. This paper explores the well-known philosophy of Transcendentalism as adopted by the Iraqi Kurdish poet Hawkar Kalary.

Kalary is a postmodern poet who has suffered from loss early in his life. He finds his way, though, to deal with those losses in his collection Your Knitted Scarf. Writing is a therapeutic way through which he deals with his feelings. As a dedicated reader, he displays the philosophies of the East and West in his poetry to reach a philosophy of his own that may or may not agree with the writers he has read for.

The paper displays the theories Kalary is affected by as well as the philosophies that have cured him and helped him reach the state of reconciliation with his past and present. The poems have no titles norare they numbered in the collection; nevertheless, they are short sketches that start on page 1 and end in page 99. The researcher finds it fit to refer to them by their page numbers.