Badr Shakir al-Sayyab His Life and Poetry

The poet was born in the village of Jikur, and in Basra he finished his secondary education, then graduated from the Higher Teachers’ College in Baghdad. He worked for a period in teaching, then worked in the General Trade Directorate, and in freelance work.
He was known for his leftist ideas that caused him to be dismissed from work more than once, and in his last days he was paralyzed, and died in Kuwait in 1964, and was buried in the cemetery of al-Hasan al-Basri in al-Zubair district in Iraq.
Al-Sayyab was distinguished by the solidity of expression and the precision of words, and his glimpses connected to the roots of his country’s soil, and his collections were a picture of his intellectual life, and he is considered one of the most skilled technical poets in modern poetry, and he fluctuated between literary schools from classicism to romanticism and then to realism, where he provided his poem with a model argument between form and content in poetic maturity and a living organic unity.
His poetry was characterized by Arabic eloquence and preservation of meter, so he did not escape from poetic meter, nor did he free himself from restrictions, although he innovated in the melodies and coloring of the poem.
He organized the story and the epic, and took care of the images, penetrating the depths of the human soul, and loved nature and melted into it, and his poetry was full of myths and symbols, and was influenced by religious and historical stories and folk tales, and used popular songs in weaving his poems.
In general, you can say that Al-Sayyab has the merit of pioneering and renewing modern poetry.
The author tried to produce this book as a collection of his poems, as he arranged it chronologically, beginning his book with a brief biography of his life.