In her marvellous new poetry collection Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, Dunya Mikhail transforms the world’s first symbols – Sumerian glyphs that were carved into clay tablets – into the matter of our everyday contemporary life. Each of the ten sections in her book is composed of twenty-four short poems, and each poem combines both text and drawing. In her note to the collection, Mikhail writes, ‘I practiced at least two layers of translation in these tablets: the first from words in one language, Arabic, to another, English; and the second from words to images. What I received from my ancestors are offerings of the future rather than of the past. Now it’s my turn to offer them to you.’
