Description
Book SynopsisA collection of poems about nature and power
To Ibn al-Mu?tazz and his Abbasid contemporaries, the hunt was more than a diversionit was the theater for their poetic and political endeavors, captured here in fifty-nine Arabic hunting poems, or ?ardiyyat. The poems of In Deadly Embrace describe hunting expeditions with animals trained to hunt, including saluki hounds and birds of prey. Many were composed after these outings, when the hunting party gathered to enjoy the game they caught.
Poetry was central to Abbasid society and served as a method of maintaining networks of patronage and friendship; the poems in this collection reflect these power dynamics and allowed Ibn al-Mu?tazzprince of the realm and in line for the caliphateto explore his own relationship to social and political power and to demonstrate his fitness to rule.
Ibn al-Mu?tazz was an influential poet and literary theorist of the Modernist school of poetry. In Deadly Embrace
