Tahereh Saffarzadeh is the only major Iranian poet who sees the afflictions of contemporary Iran in terms of a spiritual wasteland and turns to Islam as the sole cure for those ethical and sociopolitical afflictions. This essay examines Saffarzadeh's conviction that faith is the only source of deliverance from the wasteland of contemporary Iran.
Saffarzadeh (b. 1936) was born in Sirjan, where she lived through her high school years. Then she went to Shiraz to study English language and literature at Pahlavi University, receiving her B.A. in 1958. In 1962 she published her first collection of poems, Rahgozar-e Mahtab [The Passerby of Moonlight], under the pen name of “Mardomak” [Pupil of the Eye].
The poems of The Passerby of Moonlight, composed during the period from 1956 to 1962, are mainly love lyrics in the chaharpareh quatrain form.