"The Return to Poetry": On Min Hawana, a Volume of Verse by Atef Karam

A few days ago a collection of verse, Min Hawana, by Mr. Atef Karam, appeared. We passed it on to a friend, a gifted man of letters who knows the worth of shadows and colors in words, that he might say his word about it. And here is "Abu Shadi," saying his word on the collection Min Hawana:

This young poet takes poetry back to its two wellsprings: "artlessness and song." Artlessness with him is the root, and everything else is branch. An artlessness of sensibility such that he carries us back to "man," to "essence." And let it be plain to you at once that — with a child's purity and his own refined sensibility — he looks out over earth and sky and embodies from them a whole muster of images. Time had worn these images of beauty away in us, confining them within narrow, cramped bounds until they were disfigured; the author of this collection brings them out again, after transmission and usage had frayed them, and sets them forth in lines of harmonious lights and shadows and colors, wondrous in their sizes and shapes, so that they appear in all purity and freshness:

As if I had glimpsed the hillside bend
creeping along, shaking time from itself

And his line: "And the hills stitched clouds upon the river."
And his line: "Chimneys of elder-blossom... in which time has turned hermit."

Part of the beauty of this "purity" is that he draws from the same source from which the artistic colloquial poetry of Lebanon has drawn, raising its colors to the level of art poetry without the Lebanese images losing a single one of their powers to stir. For the scent of the soil, the withdrawing of mist and smoke, the shore's hushed listening, the star's flood, the vineyard, and the ring of the brook are the space of these poems and their playground:

And our tent in the vineyards folds the clouds away,
and on the moonlit night you see the winepress
pouring, giving the stars to drink

Space and earth are brimming with remembrance, and longing with phantoms of the past. The shadow of the past throws itself across the poet's present, so that what fills him with awe from the first age of boyhood grows sweet to him in his present. This blood-stained sash:

"From the feathers of what wing, the color of what morning,
were the colors of this sash dyed, O light of my eyes?
As though my lifetime were in it, and my grievous wounds"

has in it not a thread nor a color of the towns; it is of the mountain's haunts, stirred by enamored breezes on the mountain paths. And the return to the countryside is a melody of unceasing longing, whether in the lock of hair and the intoxication or in the dance and the prayer. These are remnants of the past that adorn the present. Of the thirty-seven poems you will find only two bare of this old echo. He often hits upon a generous rhyme-letter that takes command and wraps the verse in an engulfing, all-embracing cadence — the whole becoming a single atmosphere of feeling. Often the meaning stirs you only because it is borne on a flood of song, so that form and essence come as one indivisible whole. And in this wave of song there is ebb and flow, taking and giving.

"Is it not enough for us that we two are strangers to what is here"
"and that life, for all its breadth, closes in upon us"

And his lines:
Give my sweet dreams back to me,
O messenger who passed through the quarter and gave greeting;
O breeze that passed after me in love of her,
take in your sleeves some part of my wounds;
O morning passing through Layla's quarter,
dreams from my own eyes have gone with you

The refrain in the first two lines; the word "give back" answering the word "passed" at the head of the first line and at its close; and, between "my dreams," "the quarter," "greeting," "wounds," "morning," "dreams," and "grows sweet" on the one hand, and the soft, drawn-out letters set against the clipped, stopping letters on the other, there is a surge of sound whose release and gathering hold all the answering echoes and harmony that the parts of a classical composition possess — no jarring, no roughness. And this rhyme-letter is, to our mind, the richest of poetry's rhymes in song. Whoever goes deep into this vein will see that the song begins lightly, then gathers strength, welling up little by little into rapture at the end of the fourth rhyme. Perhaps the repetition of the selfsame words is what makes the poetic chant come so easily. Does it not seem to you that this wave of poetry dies away upon the shore of the "poetry of Majnun," with all its gentleness and sensibility, its softness and limpidity?

Then the collection holds two poems of another stamp — I mean "The Call of Survival" and "My Father": the first for its depth of thought and beauty of carving, the second for its splendor of image and firmness of casting. These two songs are of another melody. See how gladly lofty poetry would claim these lines as its own — on the death of "my father," and on the struggle between survival and extinction, between life and death:

"One impulse seeking room, and another
that clenched its palm upon the garment of evening;
and it tightened — thing gripping thing —
and the rope of rescue stretched across space;
and in the cavern of the eyes a fathomless deep,
like darkness hidden within darkness

And he continues, on the working of the dark:
And it kneels down from your guarded outposts
and lets fall over you the curtain of evening,
wherein, like saffron-dye, is the dust of deaths
and the panting of the yellow braziers;
and I felt the sky slacken the earth's hand
and choke upon the black tear" — etc.

* * *

We hold against him his excess of looseness, which at times reaches slackness. His "mitwa'a" may also be held against him, the pattern mif'ala not being heard in the feminine. And certain colloquial words into which his subject and its colors draw him — though the modern poets of the Abbasid age did not scruple at this; indeed they counted it a necessity.

However that may be, it is natural for some poems to surpass others, and for parts to rise above parts within a single work.

Yet there is in the freshness of feeling and of sense, and in the sweetness of the singing, that which lifts this new collection, Min Hawana, to the rank of high poetry — a poetry we had only lately come near to losing through bondage to imitation and excess of poetic theories.