On a Thread of Light

Description

With a poem titled “A Long Novel,” Ibrahim Nasrallah opens this collection, and with a short film, he concludes it. Between these two poems lie eighty others, drawing from the seven arts that are powerfully present in this poetic work. It moves through vast expanses of the human spirit, its concerns, its anxieties, and its current struggles. If creative work is a constantly renewed adventure, then this journey, “On a Thread of Light,” is a bold one, taking Arabic poetry to numerous sources, perhaps ones it needs today. For whenever sources are renewed, poetry is renewed. In this creative and fertile ground of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s poems, his experience confirms that a poet can innovate greatly and remain a poet connected to the collective aesthetic achievements of all the arts. In a poem titled “Solitude,” the poet Ibrahim Nasrallah writes:

“Poems are always lost, scorned by women, the heavens, and prophets. They are neither purely a dream nor purely knowledge, neither a bird basking in the sun nor a rose in the garden! They are written by a gasp outside of death, words cannot decipher them, nor can life’s secret and open escape to truth. / The young man will set them as a trap for the girl who has become trapped in the clothes of a friend, and the girl will revel in them for half a year. / And remember them after a long life, / By then, the beautiful time will have ended… and the tender songs. / The poem sits silently in the heart of its ember, dressed in mourning clothes, surrounded by withered trees… and men of dust… women of ash!”