The Arab world's greatest living poet.--The New York Times

Adonis is one of the most important major literary figures of our century. His vision is extraordinary, his poetry sublime . . . a master of our times.--V. S. Naipaul

At first glance, Sufism and Surrealism appear to be as far removed from one another as is possible. Adonis, however, draws convincing parallels between the two, contesting that God, in the traditional sense, does not exist in Surrealism or in Sufism, and that both are engaged in parallel quests for the nature of the Absolute, through holy madness and the deregulation of the senses.

This is a remarkable investigation into the common threads of thought that run through seemingly polarised philosophies from East and West, written by a man Edward Said referred to as the most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arab modernity.

Adonis is one of the most celebrated poets and essayists of the Arab world. Born in Syria in 1930, he fled political persecution and settled in Lebanon in the 1950s, where he led the modernist movement in Arabic poetry. He has written more than thirty books in Arabic, including the pioneering work An Introduction to Arab Poetics, and was awarded the Goethe Prize in 2011 for his contribution to international literature. His other awards include the Spiros Vergos Prize for Freedom of Expression, the Bj rnson Prize, the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, and the Syria-Lebanon Best Poet Award.

Adonis in the Pyrenees: another conversation in the mountains where a multiplicity of orients and occidents intermingle, where dialogue between Adonis, the major Arab-language poet at work today, and Pierre Joris, nomad poet between the United States, Europe, and North Africa, becomes polylogue, exchanging reflections that range from the destructive role all monotheisms play in history -- in relation to woman, but also to the power structures throughout cultures -- to questions of poetics and the possible role of the spiritual in contemporary poethics. These conversations -- under the general title Religion is an answer, poetry a question -- took place in June in the small village of Germ-Louron in the French Pyrenees in the context of Les Porteurs de Mots /The Word-Carriers, an annual cultural festival organized by Franck Morini re. These conversations were framed by a range of events, musical & theatrical performances, poetry readings and talks.

Adonis dans les Pyr n es: autre conversation dans les montagnes o une multiplicit d'orients et d'occidents s'entrem lent, o un dialogue entre Adonis, le plus important po te de langage arabe au travail aujourd'hui, et Pierre Joris, po te nomade entre l'Europe, les Etats-Unis et le Maghreb, devient polylogue, change de r flexions allons du r le destructeur que jouent tous les monoth ismes dans l'histoire -- par rapport la femme, mais aussi aux structures de pouvoir de toutes les cultures -- des questions de po tiques et du r le possible d'une spiritualit dans la po thique contemporaine. Ces conversations -- sous le titre de La religion est une r ponse, la po sie une question -- eurent lieu en juin 2017 dans le petit village de Germ-Louron dans le Pyr n es dans le contexte d'un festival culturel annuel, Les Porteurs de Mots, organis par Franck Morini re. Conversations encadr es par un essaim d' v nements: performances musicales et th trales, lectures de po sie, et expos s.

This is a bilingual English/French edition.

Adonis's poetry and prose writings have aroused much controversy in the Arab world, both for their provocative content and their arresting style. Grounded in traditional poetic styles, Adonis developed a new way of expressing modern sentiments. Although influenced by classical poets, Adonis started at a relatively early age to experiment with the prose poem, giving it density, tension, metaphors, and rhythm. He also broke with the diction and style of traditional poems, introducing a new and powerful syntax and new imagery. Through his innovative use of language, imagery, and narrative technique, Adonis has played a leading role in the revolutionizing of Arabic literature. He has garnered many of the world's major poetry prizes.

In A Time Between Ashes and Roses Adonis evokes the wisdom of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, liberally excerpting from and remolding its images; the modernism of William Carlos Williams; and the haunting urban imagery of poets such as Baudelaire, Cavafy, and Lorca. Three long poems allow him to explore profoundly the human condition, by examining language and love, race and favor, faith and dogma, war and ruin. In the lyrical This Is My Name and Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings, Adonis ponders Arab defeat and defeatism. In A Grave for New York, he reflects on the same theme by interrogating Vietnam-era America.

This bilingual edition, presenting the poems in Arabic and English on facing pages, is enhanced by a critical bibliography of Adonis's works, providing an accessible and crucial reference for scholars of modern and Middle Eastern poetry and culture. Shawkat M. Toorawa's vivid and eloquent translation finally makes the poet's signature work available to an English-speaking audience; the effect is no less powerful than were the first translations of Pablo Neruda into English.

Poetry for [Adonis] is not merely a genre or an art form but a way of thinking, something almost like mystical revelation.--Charles McGrath, New York Times

Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis is one of the most celebrated poets of the Arabic-speaking world. His poems have earned international acclaim, and his influence on Arabic literature has been likened to that of T. S. Eliot's on English-language verse. This volume serves as the first comprehensive survey of Adonis's work, allowing English readers to admire the arc of a remarkable literary career through the labors of the poet's own handpicked translator, Khaled Mattawa.

Daring in form and prophetic in tone, Adonis's poetry sings of both the sweet promise of eros and the problems of the self. He writes of childhood (Your childhood is a village. / You will never cross its boundaries / no matter how far you go); of blood, bombs, and mutilation (Murder has changed the city's shape); and of the anguish of exile ('I write poetry in the language of the country that sheltered me, ' said a young man who looked old). Adonis demonstrates the poet's affection for Arabic and European lyrical traditions even as his poems work to destabilize those sensibilities.

This collection positions the work of Adonis within the pantheon of the great poets of exile, including César Vallejo, Joseph Brodsky, and Paul Celan, providing for English readers the most complete vision yet of the work of the man whom the cultural critic Edward Said called today's most daring and provocative Arab poet.

Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis later moved to Lebanon and became a pivotal figure in the new poetry of the late 1960s. With the publication of Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs in 1963--widely viewed as a watershed moment in Arabic poetry--Adonis forged a new set of possibilities for Arabic poetry, writing in traditional meters but infusing them with modernist rhythms, styles, and conceptual complexities.

Translators Adnan Haydar (University of Arkansas in Fayetteville) and Michael Beard (University of North Dakota) co-edit a series of books, Middle East Literature in Translation, for Syracuse University Press.

Restless and relentless, Adonis explores the pain and otherness of exile, a state so complete that absence replaces identity and becomes the exile's only presence. Exile can take many forms for the Arabic poet, who must practice his craft as an outsider, separated not only from the nation of his birth but from his own language; in the present as in the past, that exile can mean censorship, banishment, or death. Through these poems, Adonis gives an exquisite voice to the silence of absence.

Adonis, an Arabic poet with Syrian origins, a critic, an essayist, and a devoted secularist, has come out of retirement to pen an extended, innovative poem on Jerusalem/Al-Quds. It is a hymn to a troubled city embattled by the conflicting demands of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Adonis's city, as a coveted land, ought to suggest the universal love of humanity; as a land of tragedy, a place of contending history and beliefs and a locus of bitterness, conflict, hatred, rivalry, and blood. Wrapping multiple voices, historical references, and political viewpoints within his ecstatic lyricism, Adonis has created a provocative work of unique beauty and profound wisdom, beautifully rendered in English by award-winning poet Khaled Mattawa.