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Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution

Ashur Etwebi

Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution

The poems in this collection move from memories of Libya before the revolution, to Libya engulfed in violent turmoil, to life in exile in the brooding landscape of Norway. Seen through the eyes of the refugee poet, the vibrant colours of the Libyan landscape, the horrors and ravages of revolution, and the strangeness of a new life within the Arctic Circle, come into sharp focus in this powerful book.

In Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution, Etwebi deftly
moves through time, space, argument and protest to
capture the essence of the 2011 Arab Spring along
with fragments from the poet’s past. The work brims
with astonishing technique and lyricism, holding
both the poet’s personal history and that of the
onlooking world. ‘Oh bird, from the treetop, can you
see Etwebia? / Can you smell the orange blossoms
of my dead brother?’ In this utt erly arresting image
taken from ‘Norwegian Blues’, Etwebi eff ortlessly
transcends the present, shooting his poems way
into an atmosphere without end. As tragic as it
sometimes feels, this for me is the collection’s most
remarkable achievement.


ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

Etwebi maintains his composure as a lyric poet…
insisting on distilled moments of revelation while
addressing his nation Libya’s most turbulent epochs
… [these] poems provide solace and rejuvenate,
holding on to memory and the purity of their
anguish. This is a stunning, beautiful book, one I’ve
been awaiting for a long time.

KHALED MATTAWA
  • Paperback £11.99 £10.79 available

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Travellers

Michelene Wandor

Travellers

MICHELENE WANDOR’s new poetry collection travels in many directions, through Europe, the Middle East and beyond, with travellers as various as Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Isabella d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia. Thematically, the poems alight at Greek mythology, gender, and the evergreens of love, anguish, power and tragedy.

The first and final touchpoints lie in the language itself, which is both guide and sustenance. Lyrical, narrative and startlingly evocative, the words and poetic shapes travel down and across pages and spaces, and continue to resonate in mind and memory.

A rich and remarkable collection — Alan Brownjohn

  • Chapbook £8.00 £7.20 available

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Maps of Desire

Manuel Forcano

Maps of Desire

Manuel Forcano, the outstanding Catalan poet, is a great traveller, and the poems in this, his first full-length book in English translation, embrace the cities, the landscapes and the people of the Middle East. Drawn from his four most recent collections, these poems use geographical and historical references to deepen and inform the narrative, and also to lay before the reader the idea of the continuity, over many centuries, of human love and desire. The beauty, joy, grief and tenderness in these poems are universal and belong to every kind of human affection - indeed Forcano has been described by the Catalan journalist and academic Pere Ballart as 'our foremost love poet'.

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Butterfly Valley

Sherko Bekas

Butterfly Valley

This is an immensely powerful poem, at once lyrical and heart-rending, and Choman Hardi's fine translation at last gives the English-speaking reader the most extensive example yet of his outstanding writing.

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Pages from the Biography of an Exile

Adnan al-Sayegh

Pages from the Biography of an Exile

A politically charged, hard-hitting and thought-provoking collection by one of Iraq's best-known poets, Adnan al-Sayegh. Throughout this collection, Adnan explores the exhausting struggle for acceptance after being forced into exile. Seemingly innocent and lyrical at first, yet infused with darker undercurrents and nightmarish imagery.

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Barefoot Souls

Maram al-Masri

Barefoot Souls

Detailing the lives of Syrian women living in Paris, these poems, capturing the unheard voices of women whose lives are suppressed in unimaginable ways, allow us to explore moments never mentioned in the news reports. Potent and never failing to capture the essence of the feminine experience with a remarkable amount of insight.

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& Silk & Love & Flame

Birhan Keskin

& Silk & Love & Flame

Birhan Keskin's poetry is finely-honed and minimal and at the same time, powerfully visual, evocative and exact. Meaning and music overlap, lines dissolve, restart and repeat.

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How Abraham Abandoned Me

Bejan Matur

How Abraham Abandoned Me

This collection covers the broad vision of mankind's history with a story of an individual journey, in the course of which the poet explores the cosmic and the microcosm, the immensities of Time and Space, of becoming and Being. The poems came during a pilgrimage in south-eastern Anatolia.

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Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants: An Anthology of Persian Poetry from Rudaki to Langroodi

ed. Ali Alizadeh and John Kinsella

Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants: An Anthology of Persian Poetry from Rudaki to Langroodi

This is a groundbreaking new collection of poems presenting the wealth of poetic voices from one of the world's most important literary cultures. The book covers poetry from the early Middle Ages to the Modernists and Postmodernists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

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The Parley Tree

ed. Patrick Williamson

The Parley Tree

The Parley Tree does not pretend to be an all-encompassing portrait of the work of French-speaking poets of Africa and the Arab World. Rather, it is a glimpse of some of the most representative voices of the poetic movements and generations in the Francophone countries of the whole continent of Africa, and as such, seeks to do away with the divisions that traditionally separate North Africa from Sub-Saharan Africa, and the African world from the Arab world.

Poetry is one of the major forms of literary expression in these two regions, and the French-language poetry of the countries included in this anthology is clearly only one dimension of an overall poetic landscape shared with other national languages such as Arabic, Fula, Bambara, Berber, Wolof, among others. But it is a dimension that is recognized as being of great literary merit and worthy of the international acclaim it has attracted. The poets anthologized here — from North Africa, Sub Saharan Africa and the Arab World — have long wished to escape from artificial pigeon-holing and rather to be associated with common threads. The past half-century has confirmed their work as poetry of great literary quality, full of a unique vitality and presence, and The Parley Tree offers an insight into a whole world that might otherwise have remained closed off to English-language readers.

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