Poetry
أنين الصواري
Not translated into English
Ali Abdallah Khalifa · 1969
Synopsis
The author's first collection, of which the sea forms the backbone. The poems draw on the world of pearl diving and on the vocabulary of the divers, taken from the popular heritage of the Gulf; one of them opens with the warning “beware of the sea”, which announces a hard season and a diet of dates and rice.
Context
Published in Beirut in 1969 by Dar al-Ilm lil-Malayin, the collection marks, according to Oman Daily, a turning point in modern Bahraini poetry, followed by Qassim Haddad's al-Bishara in 1970 and by a collection by Alawi al-Hashimi in 1972. The publisher, the same article reports, agreed to print it after finding enough pearls in it. The author then published some ten collections, up to 2019, followed by his collected works, Fifty Years of Poetry.
Who it is for
For reading a poetry of sailors and divers, on the threshold of the poetic modernity of the Gulf.
Prizes and reception
The critic Ahmed al-Manaï praised in 1975, in al-Aqlam, its new language, the precision of its words and its use of popular terms.