Mahmoud Darwish by Khaled Mattawa

Author:Khaled Mattawa
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815652731
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2018-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

Collective Soliloquies

In Lesser Roses, Darwish begins by responding to a poem in his previous book Hiya Ughnia, Hiya Ughnia (It’s a Song, It’s a Song, 1985), which he ended with the startling declaration, “It’s time for the poet to kill himself / not for anything, / but to kill himself” (2005, 3:75). In Lesser Roses, the poet begins with a vow “to walk this long, long road to its end” (107), convinced that “in this life there is much to love” (111). Darwish’s embrace of life is coupled with an embrace of poetry as he emerges a new poet with a new look to his poems. Armed with formal innovations and speaking in a more immediate, wide-reaching timbre, Darwish returns forcefully to language because “it is all he has recourse to . . . eager to show that as a poet he cannot be but a poet” (Snir 2008, 126).

The titles of the poems in Lesser Roses are usually the first few words of the poem. It is common for poems to be known for their first lines, but not to be titled as such. With titles that do not encapsulate or shed a retrospective light, the poems gush forth as whole utterances until they reach their end. This immediate leap into the poems’ content is marked by the absence of sections or stanzas in the vast majority of the book, as if there is no time to pause. Shifts in rhetoric, focus, or subject matter within the poems have to be taken as part of the whole and are indicative of the turbulence of the moment experienced.

Lesser Roses, as a volume, contrasts with Darwish’s foray into the lyric-epics of Beirut. Most of the poems occupy a single page and are written in long lines—suggestive of “the long, long road” that the poem, and the poet, must walk. This combination, of long lines in short poems, is new to Darwish. And the fact that the poems are all of similar length suggests that, in many ways, they are a studied variation on a theme. The settings of the poems—Córdoba, Aden, and others—change, but the circumstances remain similar. Repeatedly, we find ourselves caught within the same prolonged delay, mired in the hurry-up-and-wait of the Palestinian exilic experience. Several poems employ rhyme, but unlike the variations on rhyme that Darwish and other taf’ila poets had used, in Lesser Roses he typically uses only a single rhyming sound. Darwish’s lines are longer even than the bahr al-ṭawil (long measure, or foot) lines of classical poetry, which can contain up to twenty syllables in Arabic. The combination of very long lines with a monorhyme scheme provides a looping track that lands us back where we started, caught up in a cycle of repeated sounds, perhaps learning a great deal, but making little physical progress.

In Lesser Roses, we sense that Darwish is addressing a different reader and has to start off with a clean referential slate. The poems in Lesser Roses do not require the

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