Bastardi Puri - Softcover

Bitar, Walid

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889842671 ISBN 13: 9780889842670

Publisher: Porcupine's Quill, 2005

Synopsis

Walid Bitar's poems read as if transmitted in softly staccato impulses from some remote time-warp in the tenth dimension. They crackle with the static of unique ciphers hurled over huge distances and we don't know at first whether they are entreaties or imprecations. Certain poems threaten, others cajole; all buzz with an energy of language that sometimes splits open the husks of their forms. Weird images and weirder personages perch upon his stanzas, not only Rhodesian Ridgebacks in constitutional snits, Actaeons ogling Diana's physique, and Tarzan in quicksand but the poet himself, weirdest of all, whose remarkable voice plots constellations and libels the starry nights. To read Bitar is to take a round-trip ticket on the Drunken Boat. His unusual and distinctive voice is by turns caustic and capricious, attuned to `rain and its minions' but also painfully aware that `to whip is human, to be whipped divine.' Best of all, like a speechless man suddenly given language, `this ambassador from El Dorado' frolics and cavorts in his `underground patois' with startling originality and mischievous flair. This is a book of poems torn between the comic and the inconsolable, now `surrendering to polkas in some smoky dive' but also, and at the same time, `Eternity's pied-à-terre.'

About this title

From the Back Cover:

`It is significant that so much of literary criticism echoes back to one of the fundamental precepts of Aristotle's Poetics -- that ``to learn gives the liveliest pleasure.'' Bitar seems to have learned this lesson well, as this book of poetry gives a jolt of liveliest pleasure. Quite simply, this is a book you should buy and keep. ... I have always believed a prime ingredient of great poetry is what I term ``the invention of language'' -- the use of language in a renewed, unexpected, unpredictable, exciting way. Language that freshens. Bitar fulfills this, from the first page onward.'

(Nicholas Samaras Harvard Review)

About the Author:

Walid Bitar was born in Beirut in 1961. He immigrated to Canada in 1969. He has taught English, most recently at Lebanese American University. His other poetry collections are Maps With Moving Parts (Brick, 1988), 2 Guys on Holy Land (Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1993) and The Empire's Missing Links (Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2008). He now lives in Toronto.

About this edition

• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0889842671
• ISBN 13: 9780889842670
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96