Modern Arabic Poetry: Revolution and Conflict

Review
"Modern Arabic Poetry: Revolution and Conflict is a study of great promise. It should answer many of the questions about the major literary directions in modern Arabic poetry beyond commitment to Nasser, Arab nationalism, and the question of Palestine in the 1950s and 1960s. It contains some very fine readings of major poems by the authors she has chosen to focus on. They considerably enhance the presentation of her arguments. The poems themselves are skillfully translated and capture the spirit of modernist Arabic poetry." –Terri DeYoung, University of Washington

"Modern Arabic poetry is often burdened unjustly with cliches about political commitment iltizam. Athamneh offers a bold analysis of how three major poets inhabit the almost mythic role of 'poet of the people' by reconfiguring and finessing iltizam with their signature approaches. The book examines how these poets delicately deploy their own poetic voices and how they inspire (and are inspired by) their publics to face postcolonial injustices. It's a timely intervention and a 'must read' for scholars and students of Arabic and comparative literature, as well as Middle Eastern studies." –Samer Mahdy Ali, University of Michigan

"Calling attention to the eruptions and upheavals in Arabic poetic statement, Waed Athamneh's Modern Arabic Poetry: Revolution and Conflict guides us, with care and insight, through the poetic lives of three major Arabic-language poets of the later twentieth century: ?Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, A?mad ?Abd al-Mu i ?ijazi, and Ma?mud Darwish. Athamneh offers a series of close and historically contextualized readings, which, different from the predominant forms of historical, political, and anthropological interpretation, respond to the compelling urgencies of the present in the fallout of the call of the Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, 'If people want to live, destiny will respond, ' in its reverberations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the Arab world." –Jeffrey Sacks, University of California, Riverside