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Alien, Correspondent

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  • Publisher:
    Brick Books, 2010
    Note: This book was purchased with support from the Government of Canada's Social Development Partnerships Program - Disability Component.

Details:

  • Date:
    Created
    2010
    Summary:

    These astute, generous poems give us contemporary Beirut in all its ravaged and incongruent beauty.

    This arresting first collection is, in part, a delicately balanced look at Beirut from the perspective of a Westerner who lives and works in that remarkable city. Whether writing about the Middle East or about domestic life, Di Nardo refuses to romanticize; he doesn’t moralize about the causes of perennial conflicts. He is that rare thing: a clear-eyed witness.

    Here and there Starbucks coffee cups collide
    with service taxis and re-assign the chaos, litter
    the brittle landscape of the coast, while the world
    command picks through the sands of lawlessness
    for just a grain of what remains of itself,
    the little air of familiarity defunct, despised and fed
    to those on foot like scraps to gutter cats in the shade
    of too many parked cars that took the place
    of date palms standing on the sidewalks.
    Yet no one would ever leave their shift at the wheel,
    or turn home in the grim belief life’s purpose is that unreal.

    (from “Oh the streets of West Beirut”)

    “Time and space are lenses Di Nardo overlays to bring Beirut into historic and personal focus… Evidence of violence abounds here, as does love, and Di Nardo epitomizes, like Cavafy, the empathy required to be its perfect correspondent.”    – John Barton

    Sujets: Lebanon--Beirut
    Original Publisher: [S.l.], Brick Books
    Language(s): English
    Collection(s)/Series: Brick Books Poetry