Table of Contents

From Clay Throb (1947)

1. Semiramis

2. Autumn Echo

3. Whimper

4. Dreaming Silence

5. Boredom

6. Clay Throb

7. Shades

8. Closed Lips

From Songs of the Dead City (1951)

9. Barrenness

10. Depths

11. Postman

12. Image

13. Three Signs

14. The Hypocritical Wound

15. At Night

16. Here You Are

17. Roads

18. Old Age

19. Dream

20. An Old Love

21. Slavery

22. O My Friend

23. Deceit

24. Lost Step

25. Loss

26. Where To

From Steps in Exile (1965)

27. Secret

28. Old Image

29. Judahs’ Repentance

30. You Came with the Dawn

31. Bitter Land

32. I Want To

33. Tomorrow Here

34. And Tomorrow I Return

35. He Said Something to Us

36. Return to Hiroshima

37. In a Few Hours

38. A Talk for Next Saturday

39. The Eighth Journey

40. At Forty

41. To My Town

42. Steps in Exile

From The Journey of Yellow Letters (1968)

43. To a Negro from Alabama

44. Disappointment of the Man of the Past

45. Desolation

46. Genesis

47. Dreaming of Return

48. Two Faces

49. Message of the Small Man

50. The Paling Salt

51. Age of Rubber Stamps

52. I Wish If

53. Short Laugh

54. The Waiting Sails

55. Suffocation

56. Call of a Nation

57. Dream of the Snow

58. At the Crossroads

59. A Child of the First War

60. Night, Cold and Wardens

61. Journey of the Yellow Letters

From Songs of the Tired Guard

62. Sleeping Pills

63. Indicted, Though Innocent

64. A Call for Stupor

65. A Dream in Four Scenes

66. Expulsion

67. The Killed Witness

68. Apology

69. Between Two Points

70. Dialogue in the Bend

71. Confessions from 1961

72. Hey… You are Indicted

73. Dialogue in Three Dimensions

74. Procession of the Seven Sins

75. Call of the Seven Sins

76. Stolen Frontiers

77. Sindbad’s Eighth Journey

78. On the Verge of the Fallen World

79. Two Voices Late at Night

80. I’ll Stay Here

About the Author

Buland Al-Ḥaidari (1926–1996) was a widely published Iraqi poet and literary critic.

‘Abdulwāḥid Lu’lu’a is professor emeritus of English literature at Philadelphia University in Amman, Jordan, and the author and translator of seventy-one books, including Listen to the Mourners: The Essential Poems of Nāzik Al-Malā’ika (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021).

Reviews

“Long overdue, this highly competent translation fills a major gap in our understanding of Arab literary history. No Middle East studies collection will be complete without it.” —Hussein N. Kadhim, author of The Poetics of Anti-Colonialism in the Arabic Qaṣīdah