Adonis: Selected Poems reviewed

Genius, revolutionary, prophet, heretic, exile: Since publishing his first collection of poetry in 1957, the Syrian poet Adonis, the pen name of Ali Ahmad Said Esber, who has lived in Paris since 1986, has been known by many titles.

Some critics claim the poet has ruined Arab poetry, while others say his innovation has saved it. Whatever opinion ultimately prevails, Adonis - who has positioned himself between Arab and Western societies and is equally critical of both - is one of the few contemporary poets whose work demands to be read, and now more than ever.

Adonis represents a class of poet that has become increasingly rare: He is as known for his literary criticism and voluminous historical texts as his famously innovative and often difficult poetry. His two-volume study of Arab culture and history, The Changing and the Fixed: A Study of Conformity and Originality in Arab Culture, published in 1973, has been banned in some Arab countries for Adonis' critical stance on what he calls the backwards-looking, clerically based nature of Arab society. But above all, Adonis is a poet.

Translator Khaled Mattawa, who has been working with Adonis for nearly 20 years, provides a representative selection of Adonis' poetry in Selected Poems, with poems from 14 books as well as an insightful prose overview of the poet's life and work.

Selected Poems reveals the transformation of Adonis' style over the past five decades to a degree that has not been possible in the previous single collections of the poet's work in English translation. Since his first publication, Adonis has progressed from closed to open forms of poetry, though his progression has not been steady; at times the poet's style seems to move in several directions at once, and at times historical events have dictated his choices.

Adonis' first books largely consist of short lyrics and lyrical fragments that seem to offer glimpses of a distant plane of the imagination. "Labor Pains" from First Poems, reconfigures archetypes, internalizing imagery from the natural world: "For whom does dawn open my eye's window, / for whom does it blaze a path between my ribs?"

Gradually Adonis began to fuse technological language onto classical imagery, and here his reputation as a poetic revolutionary becomes clear. The poem "A Mirror for a Question," from Stage and Mirrors, published in 1968, ends with these lines: "I did not know that my face / was a ship that sails inside a spark." This couplet shows Adonis' ability to create images and phrases that are staggering in their complexity yet sit, naggingly elusive, on the edge of logic.

Despite Adonis' verbal and visual ingenuity, however, his most affecting work is often that which is tied to real places and events. Readers with knowledge of Middle Eastern history will take special interest in The Book of Siege, published in 1985, which is perhaps Adonis' most accessible collection, and which Muttawa calls "perhaps one of the best war books ever written in Arabic." The book was prompted by Adonis' firsthand experience of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It is said that the poet's bedroom was bombed while he and his wife sat in the living room.

Adonis' skill with language and his depth of vision intersect with history in The Book of Siege, an occurrence that is rare yet necessary for great poetry. The poet's mind-bending surrealist images fuse with real events from the poems' very first lines: "The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust. / Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space."

Here, and throughout the poem, Adonis provides a correlative image to the violence of the invasion and makes a claim for poetry as the only form of communication able to grasp and grapple with a schism of reality that threatens to surpass language.

The Israeli invasion seems to have altered the form of Adonis' poetry. Single lines and whole poems become longer, and the poet's imagery takes on igneous fluidity.

"Murder has changed the city's shape - this stone / is a child's head- / and this smoke is exhaled from human lungs. / Each thing recites its exile ... a sea / of blood- and what / do you expect on these morning except their arteries set to sail / into the darkness, into the tidal wave of slaughter?" 

In Adonis' next volume, Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter, published in 1987, the verbal fluidity exhibited in The Book of Siege is pushed even farther, as the poet breaks the page into quadrants and conducts several simultaneous narratives, which combine to form a resonating verbal chorus.

Adonis' most recent work, including Prophesy, O Blind One, published in 2008, is centered in clear geographic locations and shows the poet - as Arab critics have pointed out - working in the tradition of the poetry of place. Mattawa rightly explains in his introduction that these poems might strike some Western readers as reminiscent of the poems of New York school poet Frank O'Hara (1946-66). "Concerto for the Road to Dante's Church" takes place in an airport and in Florence, Italy.

"The last corridor to the airplane. A woman kisses her drooping lover on the lips whenever he takes a step. A rhythm that equates steps and kisses. Next to me on the plane a woman pours herself on her seat like a thin light. A crooked nose. She is weeping. I do not dare ask her the reason.

Perhaps her heart, like this era, is full of holes," Adonis writes.

In this last line we see one of Adonis' repeating gestures: a sudden leap from the personal to the universal and back. Just as the poet seems to be equally comfortable with traditional and innovative forms, short poems and poems of epic length, he is equally able to move from minute details to sweeping yet insightful generalizations.

Purists are not likely to rest easy with Adonis' poetry, which often weaves several narratives, often includes swaths of prose, often stymies logical comprehension and almost always resists closure. But several definitions of poetry can be found throughout Selected Poems, shedding light on Adonis' constantly developing relationship with the art and his pursuit of its limits.

"The best thing one can be is a target- / a crossroad / between silence and words," he writes in "The Beginning of Poetry." In part IV of Celebrating Vague-Clear Things, published in 1988, Adonis calls writing "the body for that which has no body," a phrase that goes a long way toward explaining the poet's innovative, at times radical, approach to form.

If one has complaints about this astute selection from Adonis' work, they are minor and concern what has been left out rather than what has been included. That Adonis has published several book-length poems certainly encourages excerpting. Readers must trust Mattawa's ability to judiciously select portions of Adonis' long poems that will best present the poet to the English-speaking world, and judging from the crispness of Mattawa's translations and his comprehensive introduction, there is no reason not to.

Nonetheless, it is somewhat disconcerting not to know from which portion of a long poem - in some cases consisting of hundreds of pages - the selection has been taken. In addition, Adonis' poem "A Grave for New York," which he wrote after a visit to that city in 1971, is not included, although it is referenced in the introduction. The poem has received significant attention in the Western world, especially since 9/11, and would seem one of the key poems to include in an American publication of Adonis' work.

The great American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) reportedly said of his career, "I don't know the value of what I've written, but I know that I've changed the game." Without doubt, Adonis - whose stature at least equals Lowell's - has changed the game of Arab poetry. With the publication of Khaled Mattawa's lucid translations in Selected Poems, Adonis may change the American poetry game, as well.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com