A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor

I very much enjoyed this selection of poems by contemporary poet Maram Al-Massri. Al-Massri was born in Syria and lives in France; she writes in Arabic.

Her poems are short; they make use of simple but evocative diction. They are passionate, erotic, complex.

In fact, the poems appear so deceptively simple that part of me wondered why I liked them so much. Was I responding to the fact of their being translations with a hint of exoticism, imagining the poet as some kind of modern-day odalisque? But as I read further, swept along in Al-Massri's complicated, questioning, and daring search for fulfillment and for herself, I knew I could let myself off the hook: there's meat to these brief, intense lyrics and the sequences they constitute.

One certainly feels that Al-Massri is in dialogue with a long tradition of Arabic poetry; this is sensed in the themes and images of love, and in the ways in which the individual poems are like episodes that reflect, challenge, open up, and refract each other and Al-Massri's themes. Al-Massri speaks, however, with a distinct and vibrant, modern voice.

Here are two selections from the series A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor, originally published in 1997:

2

How foolish:
Whenever my heart
hears a knocking
it opens its doors.

64

She set out
to offer him
her pores
and her nails
adorned with cherries
which he ate
ravenously.

She left
with the basket
of her heart
emptied out.


And here the ending of I Look to You, originally published in 2000:

99

Whenever a man
leaves me
my beauty increases.

100

Increases...


Both sequences explore themes of love and betrayal, power, freedom, abandonment. I admit to preferring the earlier Red Cherry, which includes more moments of innocence and awakening; more poems in the later sequence reflect on burdens, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment. Despite this, I found the entire volume a pleasure to read. Al-Massri speaks with energy, authority, and honesty.

Although I confess that the Arabic text of this bilingual edition was Greek to me, translator Khaled Mattawa (a poet in his own right) continues to impress me.

This volume was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004.