Shams al-Din Muhammad, better known as Hafez, is Iran’s most revered poet. Writing in the 14th century, his work mostly takes the form of short love lyrics (ghazals), which can be read either as being directed to an earthly lover or to God. Influenced by Sufism (the mystical tradition of Islam), the language is passionate and ecstatic, often employing metaphors of excess and intoxication.

When Iranian-born artist Jila Peacock re-encountered the poetry of Hafez, her initial response was to turn the poems into images. Inspired by a Persian artistic tradition, she fashioned the words themselves into the shape of something within the poem – a fish, a lion, a peacock – exploiting the dynamic and flexible nature of the Arabic calligraphy in which the Persian language is written, to produce images of an extraordinarily vivid beauty. She then started translating the poems into English.

The result was a limited edition of a large and beautiful artist’s book, Ten Poems from Hafez (2004), hand-printed at the famous Glasgow Print Studio, and a smaller, less expensive edition produced by Sylph Editions to coincide with the British Museum’s exhibition of contemporary Middle Eastern calligraphy, Word into Art (2006).

Tongue of the Hidden (2007), a collaboration between Jila Peacock and the filmmaker David Alexander Anderson, is the next stage of the Hafez journey. Focusing on just two of the poems, The Peacock and The Fish, this short film presents a concentrated burst of sensuous moving images, hallucinatory in its intensity. The film begins with the words themselves flowing on to the screen from right to left, as the voice of Anoosh Jahanshahi sings out, until the whole screen is overlaid with a drift of letters. Through this drift a hand emerges, delicately placing a letter within the body of a fish. The words seem simultaneously substantial and delicate – a metaphor for the transformative power of language and the fragility of meaning.

In the opening of The Peacock, a single letter J is blown through a dreamy, underwater landscape, as the mournful voice of the poet bemoans his separation from the beautiful but elusive beloved. The plucked strings of a sitar enhance the dreamlike and hypnotic effect; a strutting peacock briefly appears before its jewel-like tail feathers dissipate into a thousand fragments. Countless layers of letters float upwards like prayers drifting to heaven.

A more urgent energy informs The Fish, as it swims restlessly up stream 'craving the beloved’s hook'. If some of Hafez’s language sounds abject, suggesting physical surrender, it is equally filled with an explosive enjoyment at being part of the larger pattern of creation. The animation brilliantly reflects this, switching seamlessly from moments of tranquil contemplation to the kind of richly kaleidoscopic pattern-making that one associates with Islamic decorative art. So that in the end, the film – like the book – works primarily on an emotional level; an audio-visual overload acting as a stimulus to thought and an aid to meditation.

Joe Staines writes about the arts and is currently Managing Editor of the Rough Guides Reference department.