Poetry
أباريق مهشمة
Not translated into English
Abdul Wahab al-Bayati · 1954
Synopsis
Poems in which the misery of the Iraqi countryside enters Arabic verse. In the village market, lean horses, flies, a soldier's old shoe and weary reapers pass by, without the poet speaking: the images follow one another like the shots of a film. Elsewhere, social anger and solidarity with the poor are expressed in a free verse that breaks with the inherited metre.
Context
The collection appeared in 1954, four years after a first book of poems, the very year its author lost his teaching post and set out into exile. Written largely in free verse, it established its author's place in modern poetry: with Nazik al-Malaika, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Shathel Taqa, al-Bayati counts among the four poets who founded in Iraq, in the second half of the forties, the school of the new verse.
Who it is for
In Arabic, with no French translation of the collection; two selections of the author's poems have appeared in French, in 1981 and in 1987. The verse, free, proceeds by juxtaposed images.
Prizes and reception
The collection that made its author known throughout the Arab world and led him to be regarded as a voice of socialist realism.
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