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Habibi: The diwan of Alim Maghrebi
Guernica Editions, Fall 2012
76 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781550716153
ISBN10: 1550716158
English
$12.00 Canada, $12.00 US
Read more from the Essential Poets Series
Habibi, the love poems of the Moroccan poet Alim Maghrebi, is the latest in a series of David Solway's poetic "translations,"dating from Andreas Karavis' Saracen Island and including Nesmine Rifat's Pallikari, Rhys Savarin's Reaching for Clear, Bartholomew the Englishman's The Properties of Things, and Dov Ben-Zamir's New Wine, Old Bottles, the latter still in manuscript. These are what Solway calls his "ostensibles," poetic voices and artifacts which he regards as constituting an extended trope or metaphor of the desire for transformation. The purpose behind such ventures is not to perpetuate a deception but to create a style and renew a customary diction -- and, ultimately, to recreate a self.
My love, why do you/ no longer write to me?/ Why are you silent as the desert rose?/ Why have you despoiled me of prophecy?/ Why do you strike me with the hands of time?
I have enjoyed David Solway's poems for decades. Here, as always, Solway writes with a Gravesian dash and brio, taking (and giving) pleasure in a fine vocabulary, a gift for surprising figures, and a striking breadth of reference.
Richard Wilbur
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