Modern Poetry of the Arab World

by Abdullah Y. al-Udhari (Editor), Various

English, Arabic (translation)

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 6, 1987

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Attempting to review poetry from a language that one does not read is large folly. Accordingly, I will limit myself to remarking that the title is a misnomer, which is not a bad thing. Rather than poetry of the Arab world, it is a sampling for four specific movements, limited in time and space: the Iraqi Taf'ila movement from the late forties and fifties; the Majallat Shi'r movement in Syria that followed Taf'ila; the Huzairan Experience that followed, in an arc from Syria to Egypt; and the Beirut Experience beginning in the eighties. The brevity of the volume and its narrow focus make it manageable for the reader who knows little of poetry in Arab cultures, where it is taken so much more seriously than in the West. Reading these sequential schools, at least in the selection brought forth here, shows a sharpening of focus, starting off from a mix of traditional (the first line of the book, from "Rain Song" by Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab, is "Your eyes are like palm groves refreshed by dawn's breath") to the modernity of writing about Ernest Hemingway. Halfway through, the main them becomes a deepening sense and repeating images of displacement and loss. The book ends with a selection of the great Mahmoud Darwish, who is known in the West: "We have a country of words. Speak Speak so we may know the end of this travel." It whets the appetite for a sequel that must be in creation as part of the Arab Spring.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book opened my eyes to the Arabic poetic tradition, one that is at once familiar, because of my upbringing with Biblical wisdom literature, but also new and refreshing, because it deals heavily in themes of exile, loss, desire, and memory. Arabic literature is weighty (fittingly so), and this book is a gateway into that tradition. Much of the imagery was pretty obscure to me, which is due in part to the fact that I am simply not immersed in the world of Middle Eastern associations and images, being a silly Westerner who was brought up on Romantic English poetry. The Arabic poets connect their environment to ideas and memories in a way that waters and feeds how I already associate places with memories.

The poets featured in this book were divided up between the various regional experiences that their work came out of. I think that the format of this book could have been improved if there had been a small history of each regional experience, as well as the poets therein, at the beginning of every section, just to condition the reader's frame of mind. Also helpful would have been a dash of explanatory footnotes for some of the more obscure literary and political references. Instead, the editor thought it helpful to footnote a section in which a certain poet used Arabic letters to demarcate different sections of his poem, something I thought could have been inferred or guessed at.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This anthology traces the four major trends in modern Arab poetry: the Taf'ila Movement (Iraqi School), 1947-57: The The Majallat Shi'r Movement ( Syrian School) 1857-67: the Huzairan (June) experience 1967-82; and the Beirut Experience, 1982 onwards.

Translated from Arabic these are very different poems, yet the themes are universal.