Amorisco

by Khaled Mattawa

“Amorisco is a book of shifting sands and apple-scented smoke, a book of surfaces whose solidity erodes or fractures or flowers unexpectedly, a book of history and secrets and secret histories, a book of supplication and vision which returns the lyric to its ancient roots in song and prayer. It is most of all a book about love and loss, which makes sense, for Khaled Mattawa is, as he tells us, a poet ‘strangely in love with the world, ripe-to be in love.’ There is, of course, erotic love— we're naked now like arrows in flight, lustful / for the lover and the grape stains on her cheeks’—but the complex ambiguities of familial love are his central concern, in poems about parents, children, partnership and separation. Mattawa is also a poet of cultural witness, tracking the self and society in their coercive conversation, attending to both ‘the sound of my footsteps/and the world’s roar.’ In this volume his native North Africa is the world evoked most richly, from the Roman past of Augustine and Marcus Aurelius, to the politically-fraught present day. So it is no surprise that Amorisco is also a book of mint tea and wild artichokes, legendary dulcimer players and desperate immigrants. No surprise, perhaps, but still a delight for mind and ear. | wish more of our poetry had this depth of humanistic engagement. | wish more poets would risk the commitment to compassion as not just an imaginative but a political act that Khaled Mattawa does, when he asks, “What else can I do but love what casts a shadow?’”
Campbell McGrath

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

Khaled Mattawa currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of four books of poetry, the latest of which, Tocqueville, won the San Francisco Poetry Center’s Book Award. Mattawa has translated eleven volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, including Adonis: Selected Poems and Concerto Al-Quds. His book Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation was a finalist for the Pegasus Prize. A MacArthur fellow, Mattawa’s awards include an Academy of American Poets Fellowship and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He is the current Editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can no longer speak of the distances the body must travel to speak to itself.
*
Come look and let me wonder. I stand on my roof
echoing the bird’s song: Do not sleep. Do not sleep now
that you have housed your longing within the pain of words.
*
What I know I cannot stir.
Forgetfulness and stars that fade
into disappointments, reminiscences
held by a pat on the back, short embrace.
*
Having all the time in the world,
what else can I do but love what fades?

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the poems in this slender collection to be provocative and pleasing to read. The author's notes in the appendix are helpful without being obtrusive. The settings move back and forth between the author's birthplace of Libya and surrounding environs and his adopted homeland of the United States. There are nods to British Literature, the sacred texts and stories of the Abrahamic religions, and to the stoic Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, among others. Exotic and personal, historical and immediate, I thought this volume a winner.

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificent meditation on time and place and tradition and humanity. Past and present and future meld in these poems, reaching out to entwine each other - much as they do in our daily lives, just with much lovelier language.

Oh, and there are cats: wonderful cats, cats written by someone who loves cats. I love Mattawa's cats so much.

[Ching-In · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm in love with the poem, "Against Ether!"