Poetry
مواكب الشمس
Not translated into English
Samih al-Qasim · 1958
Synopsis
Poems of youth in which recur the dawn rising over the peoples, the land one will not leave, yesterday's dead and the call to stand upright. The tone is one of exhortation rather than lament, and the three lines that open the book announce a day come to wash the horizon of its darkness. Almost everything in it is metred and rhymed, as in Arabic poetry of old.
Context
The volume came out in Nazareth, from the al-Hakim press, running to a hundred pages, and its author was nineteen. The Arabs who had remained in Israel were then living under a military regime that lasted until 1966, and their books were printed in Nazareth, Acre or Haifa for lack of any way to publish elsewhere: it took until 1969 for a collection by the same man to appear in Beirut. The poems gathered here are the first he wrote, almost all rhymed and metred, and the one that gives the book its name opens it in three lines.
Who it is for
About a hundred pages in Arabic, in metred and rhymed verse. It helps to know that this is an early book and that the free manner with which its author is associated is not yet his.
Prizes and reception
The first book of a body of work that will number more than seventy, and the starting point of what has been called resistance poetry.