Description
Book SynopsisMaram al-Massri is an Arab love poet for the modern age. She writes short, seductive lyrics of astonishing clarity and piercing candour, stringing them together like pearls in a story chain. This first English translation of her work draws together poems from two sequences. Her red cherry is like red lips, a fruit or drop of blood offered for the reader to taste in the poems, but abandoned to the coldness of the white-tiled floor, the white paper of the page. Her lines are anguished but tightly reined, breaking completely with traditional Arab love poetry to draw on everyday language as well as images and metaphors remembered and reinvented from childhood and the Koran.
Trade Review"'Maram al-Massri relates the most subtle events of her life - a life completely rooted in the unassuaged anxiety of love, a love from which neither desire nor fear nor tenderness are absent; she tells of her joy in being the object of somebody's advances, or her disappointment when she is not. She tells of the violence of a moment of passionate intensity or the bittersweet duration of a memory...It's only love that's worth living for, says Maram, and love is always about to leave...All that remains is the awful, muffled beating of this heart or, still lighter and distinct, the sound of footsteps in the garden, footprints barely visible in the sand, as if the soul had bare feet, and was walking' - Salah Stetie; 'Maram al-Massri needs only certain mots justes, certain utterances, to evoke the intimacles of love, the simplest as well as those most charged with secrecy and meaning. Both precise and dreamy, Maram al-Massri's intimate poetry gives a voice to the soft light which illuminates the wonder of being in love' - Lionel Ray"
