From Amazon.com
As she grieved over the "huge shadow [that] had been cast across the lives of so many innocent people and an ancient culture's pride" after September 11, 2001, poet and author Naomi Shihab Nye's natural response was to write, to grasp "onto details to stay afloat." Accordingly, Nye has gathered over four dozen of her own poems about the Middle East and about being an Arab American living in the United States. Devoted followers of the award-winning and beloved poet will recognize some of their favorites from her earlier collections (
The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East, etc.), while absorbing themselves in her new haunting and evocative poems. Nye writes of figs and olives, fathers' blessings and grandmothers' hands that "recognize grapes, / and the damp shine of a goat's new skin." She writes of Palestinians, living and dead, of war, and of peace. Readers of all ages will be profoundly moved by the vitality and hope in these beautiful lines from Nye's heart. (Ages 9 to adult)
--Emilie Coulter
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Books in Canada
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye is no stranger to the conflicts in the Middle East. She's the daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mother and much of her work as a poet and anthologist has been to find bridges between the work of writers and artists of the Middle East and North American readers. Her extraordinary anthology, Flags of Childhood, brought together poets from all over the Middle East, Arab and Israeli.
"All my life I thought about the Middle East, wrote about it, wondered about it, loved it," she writes in her introduction to her stunning collection of poetry, 19 Varieties of Gazelle. Here are poems that celebrate friends and neighbours, giving young readers a glimpse of the ordinary day-to-day lives that people live in the Middle East, lives outside of conflict that are the same as lives everywhere. Here are poems that smell of strong aromatic coffee and hand-tinted photographs, kitchens rich with cooking smells, jars of olives. Here are memories of a beloved grandmother, a favourite uncle. And here too are men, women and children who have been brutalized by decades of conflict-lives lived within the confines of refugee camps, homes destroyed by bombs, haunted by memories of a dead child, separated from family members they love by by vast continents. It is a reminder of the lives of the "innocent citizens of the Middle East who haven't committed any crimes. The people who are living solid, considerate lives, often in difficult conditions-especially children, who struggle to maintain their beautiful hope.
I support all people on earth
who have bodies like and unlike my body,
skin and moles and old scars,
secret and public hair, crooked toes. I support
those who have done nothing large,
sifter of lentils, sifter of wisdoms,
speak. If we have killed no one
in the name of anything bad or good,
may light feed our lefiest veins.
In the wake of September 11th, Nye wants more than ever that her young readers believe that peace is possible. Through poetry, she offers them the hope that in sharing their lives, their hearts and their imaginations, there is truly common ground that all of us can share.
Jeffrey Canton (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
