Poetry in Saudi Arabia today is a dramatic manifestation of the rapid changes that are sweeping not only through the country s literature and culture but also through Saudi life as a whole. The unyielding tension between the forces of change and tradition are nowhere more painfully visible than in the poem. Bringing together three […]
Poetry is one of the major forms of literary expression in both Africa and the Arab World and this anthology endeavours to provide the reader with a glimpse of the most representative voices of the poetic movements, and generations, in the French-speaking countries of these two regions, at the same time as doing away with […]
John Milton’s poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are among the greatest pieces of writing in the English language. Like other writers of his time, Milton had only a sketchy idea of Islam and the Arab world, from travellers and linguists who had made the arduous journey to and from the Middle East. But buried […]
Nostalgia, My Enemy collects some of the best of Saadi Youssef’s most recent poems from the last decade, since the on-going American-led war in his home country of Iraq. In direct, penetrating language, translated from the original Arabic by Sinan Antoon and Peter Money, Youssef’s poems dwell on the casualties of the war, the loss […]
One of the foremost Palestinian poets and a major figure in the Arabi world, Samih al-Qasim was born in 1939, in Zarqa, Jordan, to a Palestinian Druze family from the Galilee. He grew up in the village of Rama and experienced the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 first hand, achieving fame as one of the celebrated […]
A bilingual (Arabic and English, printed on facing pages) collection of poems on the themes of love, death, the passage of time and the passing of the seasons. The voice in the poems draws on a wealth of traditions, including the classical, the chivalric, the neo-classical and the modernist.
Finally available in English, Le Règne de barbarie by Abdellatif Laâbi is one of the most daring poetic visions of the second half of the twentieth century. First published in 1976 while Laâbi was serving an eight-year prison sentence (1972-1980) for ‘crimes of opinion’ against the Moroccan state, The Rule of Barbarism is a devastating […]