News in Brief
Iranian poet Mohabbat dies at 80
IRNA – Iranian poet Mohammad-Javad Mohabbat, who is known to many Iranians, particularly school children, for his didactic poem, ‘The Two Pines,’ died of heart disease at the age of 80.
Mohabbat died on Tuesday at a hospital in Iran’s western city of Kermanshah, where he lived most of his life.
For more than 40 years, Mohabbat composed delicate poems in the two main forms of lyric and masnavi (series of couplets in rhymed pairs).
‘The Two Pines,’ a masanvi, which tells the story of friendship between two pine trees and its impact on communication lines outside a village, made Mohabbat famous in Iran after the poem appeared in schoolbooks.
Since 1983, the poet was a member of a team of writers and contributors to the country’s textbooks.
Sculptor Phyllida Barlow dies at 78
FT – British artist Phyllida Barlow, best known for sculptures crafted of everyday materials that she described as “nonmonumental,” died on March 12, at the age of 78 in London.
Barlow found international acclaim in the early 2010s after retiring from a successful teaching career and went on to represent Britain at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Her site-specific sculptures evoke the destructed landscapes of London in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when Barlow was a child, suggesting death, gore, and violations of the human body. Just as Barlow forced the viewer to make sense of her sculptures’ subject matter, the artist also created optical illusions with weight and structure. She combined heavy materials such as cement and metal with low-cost commodities including styrofoam and plywood, building imposing, large-scale works that appeared to defy gravity and stand at risk of falling over.