\u201cIn the name of the singular mountain within my sorrows, I advance; no water shall be spared\u2014I advance… nor shall any dream survive\u2014a dream handed down from that primal death with which the sea sealed its horizons, and which took wing like an eagle over the dry lands of migrations\u2014lands dazzled by secret grief and by children walking singly upon the fabric of sound, veiling themselves before the hymn of the secret trees. I advance, furrowed like ravines wounded by the hooves of oxen driven by farmers. My conscience is a *maestro* in a choir of kindred spirits whom I lead toward my own inner niche; I fear backsliding when I proclaim the promised beginning and the forests that open my bays to a conflagration possessing a Gypsy-like grace\u2014and I fear. (Why? Alone in my wells, I might create kindred spirits who respect my tenderness\u2014a tenderness exposed to the prison cells of leaders.) In the choir, as I advance, I bind my steps; at every crossroads, I carve out a grave, leave it behind me, and press on… (Antioch of bold proclamation, Jaffa, and Amman outpace me; rooms, valley-brides, daisies, and… rare things outpace me. The villagers\u2019 shoes outpace me toward the foyer of my days.) In that foyer, when revolutions take me by surprise, I hang up my days and begin the usual questions about my mother\u2019s little bird flitting between gunpowder crates and helmets inhabited by fish; I ask about revolutionary broadsheets and the public figures printed at the base of the soil they bring from a land that has draped its garments over the clotheslines of the poor. I question the days, and I hang my days in the foyer until they crack. (O revolutions, declare your lineage!)\u201d The history of individual creative achievement teaches us a profound lesson: exceptional literary works tend to do one of two things\u2014either establish a new stylistic mode or render an old one obsolete. In either case, they stand as unique phenomena. The work of Salim Barakat\u2014particularly his poetry\u2014is a prime example of this uniqueness; his verse has breathed new life into the contemporary Arab poetic landscape, while his novels (fourteen works to date) have revived a narrative world where the marvelous serves as a colossal force for reimagining and reconstructing reality.
\nMost importantly\u2014and this is by no means a paradox\u2014Barakat, a Kurd, wrote in a vibrant, surging, and eloquent Modern Standard Arabic\u2014a language that is miraculous, captivating, fluid, and possessed of immense richness, boldness, and gravitas. He played a pivotal role in modernizing its syntactic structure, rhetorical applications, and discursive functions. Consequently, he has become a focal point, a benchmark, and a source of profound influence. It goes without saying that with the release of this comprehensive collection\u2014comprising eleven volumes of poetry\u2014Salim Barakat stands as the architect of a new stylistic era in both poetry and the novel, and one naturally anticipates even more from him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A comprehensive collection encompassing a diverse body of poetic work spanning multiple stages of his career; it is distinguished by linguistic density, evocative imagery, rich imagination, and a modernist style, all while maintaining a palpable presence of history, memory, myth, and place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":32315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_cat":[940,939,2470,921],"product_tag":[1148,2728,1276,1086],"class_list":["post-32316","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-arabic-literature","product_cat-the-complete-works","product_cat-poetry","product_cat-literary-texts","product_tag-culture","product_tag-literature","product_tag-myths","product_tag-poetry","pa_book-author-salim-barakat","first","onbackorder","sale","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/32316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32316"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=32316"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=32316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}