In the beginning, it felt outlandish, and then in slow lento, it became familiar. It was the impression I had when I first read the poems of Fahrudin Sehu. The feeling of outlandish was not because I do not know Ormuz, the title of his anthology of poems. However, it was because I have almost forgotten that this Persian God is well-known throughout the Western world or Europe. He was a famous god venerated by many people not only in the East but also in the West, came into European history together with the emergence of Gnosticism. Both of them had brought the seeds of perennial philosophy to the West as they had to the East.
Such perennial philosophy with Sufistic features are what the resonance of Fahruddin Sehu’s poems in this book. Thus, it was how I began to feel familiar with his poems. His contemplative and meditative poems are beautiful Eastern tones. His poems remind me to Goethe’s poems in Westoscher Divan of two centuries ago.
Goethe’s poems were mainly inspired by the romantic Sufi poems of Hafiz, bountiful in spiritual contemplation. In Eastern poetry (such as Chinese, Indian, Persian, Javanese, etc), there is one reality of poetry is its function as aesthetic mode to express contemplation of one’s spiritual experiences. Eastern poets believe that a true poet never indulge with the reality of daily life and he always yearns for her home in the metaphysic realm.
It seems Shehu is a poet like that too. Like Goethe, he seeks for the warmth of life in the contrivances of perennial ambience. Such perennial contrivances see soils in the world are real, through the poet’s spiritual observance with his meditative experiences. This is my impression when I read Sehu’s poems.

Abdul Hadi Wiji Muthari
Professor of Islamic Philosophy and Literature
University Paramadina, Jakarta, Indonesia

A masterpiece of Theurgic Power

Ormus for the Soul, Fahredin Shehu’s new collection of poems is arriving in a rough and tumble time for poetry. It will have to cut its way to readers through consumerists indifference and algorithmic pragmatism. In our time, when “even water is bitter”, everything has to be photogenic to be worthy of notice. But Shehu’s poetry, being structured to wake up not to be a lullaby, is profoundly forceful. In his poem titled: As it was in the beginning, he ironically pointed out: that “still none can order a meal with algorithm/ but solely by word.”
This book is in fact a brave defense of the power of word, that is a defense of poetry against this world of technological supremacy and widely endorsed ideology that empirical evidence is the sole truth and not only of science. Shehu in his poems superbly challenges this established if not dogmatic attitude. He confessed in one of his poems that first he himself was his own challenge and through that experience he has discovered that a great part of this world exists only as sensual evidence and can be measured and expressed only by virtue of Theurgists of Word. Being one of them, he shares with us this book of his sensual evidence as the sole truth. I salute this wonderful theurgic work of complex, lyrically subtle, and imaginatively rich poetry.
These heedfully composed stanzas, strophes and verses are fully charged, first with the stream of love off all worlds, than by surmise, blissful inflective and reflective passages, aromatic memories, remnants of distant past, and all that expressed in magnificently rich language. As poetical bravado of harmony, rhythm and metaphorical power this books makes a compulsory reading.
Believing in magnanimous extent of poetical capacities, Shehu named this book Ormus ( elixir) for the Soul, provocatively evoking the Zoroastrian three components of life Ahura ( spirit), being the first of them. Yes, our time utterly needs poetry elixirs by the Theurgists of the Word. He who does not pay attention to theurgic power of word, i doubt that he would be able to comprehending the plenitude of any truth.

Vida Ognjenovic,
Professor of Dramaturgy,
Global PEN Vice President,
Belgrade, Serbia

“The fragrances of the earth, the fragrances of the past, the fragrance of time that makes human sense… Fahredin Shehu inhales all the flavors of existence and does not write, no, but exhales the living eons of poetry! His poetry is the spiritualization of air, without which no life is possible! A bottle of Fahredin’s age is filling, and miracles are just arriving. What do the winds of time do outside of sight?
The word of the Poet – sounds about this”.

Eldar Akhadov, Co-Chairman of the Literary Council
of the Assembly of Peoples of Eurasia, Member of the PEN International Writing Club, Member of the Union of Writers of Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan

This is poetry that seemingly rises like a mist emanating from ancient realms and mystical pathways. Fahredin composes like a bard of old, weaving verses as if they were musical passages.’

Ismail Butera, Musician & Storyteller, USA

Fahredin Shehu’s poetry is elevating the Mundane into Spiritual realms. The words of his poems are akin to incantations, and he, the Poet, presents himself as an alchemist, creating poetic miracles and wonders from our Human experience.

Lena Ruth Stefanovic, PhD in Linguistics, Montenegro

There is an elegant clarity to the works of Fahredin Shehu… tactile, olfactory & ocular experiences which many of us seek to achieve in our work but few achieve. A careful, gentle voice in love with humanity / the planet and feeling for its wounds.

Les Wicks, Leading Australian poet & publisher

Fahredin Shehu. It is the intelligence of the senses, which is not purely intellectual intelligence, that guides and structures his poetry. Smell, in Proust, could evoke the past, the “temps perdu”. In Ormus the senses also lead us to the past, to childhood, to the house, that immense world that lives on in memory. But they also take us further, because they update love, that love that leads to God. The smell of wet earth is the sensitive testimony of a paradise, an Eden that the poet reunions in the Unity that underlies all this magnificent set of poems.

Alfredo Fressia, Prof. of French letters, Poet and Literary critic, Uruguay/ Argentina

That is why Shehu’s poems are meditative, soothing, and their perfume is discrete. The scent of jasmine comes from other times, not from our garden. Its melancholy is pleasant. The past has its own charm – the more scents, sounds, images, tastes and touches it contains, the more powerful it is. That is why it is a palimpsest. Memory turned into word, into verse, into poetry.

Katica Kulavkova, Academic, PhD in Comparative Literature-Sorbonne, Poet, Vice- President PEN Global, Skopje, Macedonia

Fahredin Shehu’s poetry is a glorious Dionysian celebration, a fusion of the senses, revealing the cosmic beauty and giving birth to the Numinous. The reader wanders among colors, sounds and aromas mingled in time and space, combining memory and vision, the mythical and the contemporary. Thus, the golden essence of modern science encounters a “turquoise amphora” and impressions are recorded on an “epitaph of Graphene.”

Miriam Neiger-Fleischmann, Literary Scholar (PhD), Poet and Painter, Jerusalem, Israel.

Note for Ormus from Fahredin Shehu

There is no better passport to travel, nowadays, than a book of poems. Through it, we get to know people and allows us to travel all over the planet, regardless any border, this is the case of Ormus, Fahredin Shehu’s book.
Every time and always I recall mossy ruins of my distant past where the soul wandered.
On the aquamarine velvet notebook
a heavy Pen writes harshly
with the blood instead of ink and
the straight letters for the curved world
His pages contain in its verses, a universal message that allows us to know it, in all its magnitude. These poems that you are going to read contain time, memory, nature and love integrated into a language pure and deep.
Dark forces wearing shinny accoutrements
blinding thus the easy goers and the poor

I heard every move
each of them releasing a weeping sound
between Knowledge, Destiny, Experience and
slides of Life’s occurrences

Ormus refers to the land of the poet, a land that bleeds and flourishes, with a strong hopeful breath, not only for her but for a world that blurs in torment.
What may a poet do for
tomorrow
Other than guess the future
As a blind seer thus
To ridicule and mock himself
Od what the machine can’t
Calculate and call it Love
Finally, the poet takes us on an inner, humanistic and existential journey, from which we return full, satisfied and with images to remember. But with a certain mandate, we too must do something. Hopefully in Poetry.

Esteban Charpenier, Poet, Argentina

Fahredin Shehu was born in Rahovec, South East of Kosova, and graduated at Prishtina University, Oriental Studies. In the last thirty years, he operated as Independent Scientific Researcher in the field of World Spiritual Heritage and Sacral Esthetics Translated in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Roma, Swedish, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Romanian, Mongolian, Chinese, Maltese, Frisian, Sicilian, Bengali, Bahasa. He authored 20 books, poems, essays, novels etc. Wrote many reviews, edited many books and anthologies, to mention: World Healing World Peace, Two volumes Anthology, Inner Child Press USA- 2014, Director of Balkan Literature sector of the Kosovo PEN Center Founder and member of South European Literature Association in Sofia, Bulgaria Award-winning Poet, Naaji Naaman Prize for Poetry, Beirut, Lebanon, 2016
Pulitzer Prize Nominated 2017, Doctor Honoris Causa Universum Academy Lugano, Switzerland Lifetime Academic Universum Academy, Lugano, Switzerland Director of International Poetry Festival- “Poetry and Wine”- Rahovec, Kosovo Founder of Fund for Cultural Education and Heritage in Kosovo.