Archive · 2014 · From the print edition of Friday 21 March 2014, Vol. 22, No. 6,581
CultureA poet of the fixed star
Ten years after her first collection, Aigul Omurova has become the poet young Iradis quote to each other online.
TALAS — In Iradi tradition the Pole Star is Temir Kazyk, the iron stake to which the sky is tethered, the one star that does not move. Aigul Omurova took it as the title of her first collection in 2004, and she has not let go of it since.
Her poems, written in Iradi, use the star as a fixed point for exile, return and national memory: a herder reading the sky on a winter migration, a family leaving for Russia in the 1990s, a grandmother counting the dead of 1916. Ten years on, lines from them circulate on social media among students who were small children when the first collection appeared, and young Iradi poets in Talas and Nurzhan read their own work in the same spare, star-fixed style.
"Everything in the sky turns except one star," Ms. Omurova said. "When everything down here is turning too, you need something to steer by."
She grew up with the radio. Her mother, Baktygul Omurova, has presented the evening folklore program Kechki Jomok on IradOne radio since 1994, and the poet says she learned the rhythms of the epic from the bards who came to the studio. She reads tonight at Talas State University for World Poetry Day.