Sadder than Water
The poetry of place, of where the poet lives and of which he knows deeply, could hardly have greater worldwide resonance than the poetry of Samih al-Qasim. Palestinian, Arab, highly educated, author of novels, plays, and criticism, as well as poems, al-Qasim has lived in the village of Rama in Galilee in the oft-disputed West Bank for all of his 67 years that he could (he has sometimes been imprisoned). Not Muslim but formerly Communist in reaction to Israel’s ethnicized class system, bespectacled, clean-shaven, rumpled–he looks very much the secular intellectual. Far more than fellow, honorably plebeian Palestinian bard Taha Muhammad Ali (whose Never Mind, 2000, has been reissued by Copper Canyon, slightly expanded, as o What, 2006), al-Qasim is prophetic–biblically so. The two long poems in this bilingual selection abound in historical and religious allusion and metaphor as they report Palestine’s long suffering and the weariness of spirit it causes, and they upbraid the world for those realities. The shorter poems most often seem personalized facets of those two diamond-bright works. Ray Olson
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