A Map of Signs and Scents: New and Selected Poems, 1979–2014
by Amjad Nasser translated by Fady Joudah and Khaled Mattawa
Northwestern University Press, 2016 Paper: 978-0-8101-3365-5 | eISBN: 978-0-8101-3366-2 Library of Congress Classification PJ7852.A677A2 2016 Dewey Decimal Classification 892.716
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Featuring poems from earlier collections of Amjad Nasser’s work and many newer uncollected poems never made available in English, A Map of Signs and Scents introduces the work of an important Arabic poet to a broader contemporary Anglophone readership. This special annotation edition helps readers view the multifaceted contexts within which Nasser has created his award-winning poems.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
AMJAD NASSER was a leading Jordanian poet, essayist, and travel memoirist. One of the pioneers of the Arabic prose poem, he cofounded a number of Arabic publications. He died in 2019.
FADY JOUDAH is a poet, translator, and practicing physician of internal medicine. His first poetry collection, The Earth in the Attic, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007.
KHALED MATTAWA is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Michigan. He has authored four books of poetry.
REVIEWS
"A Map of Signs and Scents offers a compelling understanding of the inertia that propels the machinery of history—something few American poets attend to. This puts Nasser in conversation with internationally prominent poets such as Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, and Derek Walcott." —Wayne Miller, author of Post- and The City, Our City
"This collection of new translations of Jordanian Amjad Nasser’s poetry serves not only as a survey of his impressive body of work, but draws together poems that demonstrate Nasser’s invaluable contribution to the global poetic aesthetic of the late twentieth century and beyond. Rich in images and ideas that emerge from the specific but speak to the universal, A Map of Signs and Scents is the perfect volume to experience Nasser’s poetry for the first time." —World Literature Today
"Amjad Nasser’s poems create new structures of the mind and heart. You find yourself not so much reading these pages as walking through them: line by line, poem after poem turns its phrase-corners to offer some new revelation, some reordered arrangement of the real. A Map of Signs and Scents extends the geography of the human in every dimension." —Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
"The sensibility of the Near East is in every line, the flavor and longing, the memories are like no other; yet he’s compared favorably to Celan, Cavafy, Borges, Neruda, in classic structure and sensuality. Nasser’s best gift is the ability to fold the ancient within the troubled 'present' with philosophical discourse and pungent imagery. Personal love, and love for this world, with all its sorrows, in lyric and poetic prose, show this man as a Master of the word in any language." —Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
“The work of Amjad Nasser forms passages in and out of time, qualities of light and darkness, images that are never only images but sentences built on and out of the density and delicacy of his beloved and mysterious red stone city of Petra, place of living memory whose deepest origins remain secret. His poems are dramatic but the drama is built into the phrasing, the turning of the verses, the relentless nature of what comes at you from within and without, the primordial and newly minted, all at once. Stopped by Homeland Security before even reaching the border on his only attempted visit to the United States, Nasser’s work truly comes from another world, one whose rhythms and texture we have long suppressed or destroyed.” —Ammiel Alcalay, author of a little history and from the warring factions
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
from Praise for Another Café, 1979
Gates to the Sky, but They Are Narrow
from Climbing the Mountain Since Gilead, 1981
Song
Grandfather
One Flower
Shoes
The Bleating of Copper
from Shepherds of Solitude, 1986
Exile
Drums
Bent Branches
Loneliness
Fever
Shade Plants
Eleven Planets for Asia
Shepherds of Solitude
from The Strangers Arrive, 1990
Chance
The Strangers Arrive
The Impending Hour
Lines to Joseph
The Lion
from Joy to All Who See You, 1994
Invocation for Entering the House
The Scent Reminds
A Rose of Black Lace
Invocation
The Sun Flung Its Golden Incisors at Me
The Lover’s Ascent
fromAscent of Breath, 1997
A Dusk Foretold
Ascent of Breath
from Whenever He Saw a Sign, 1998
Meritocracy
Haiku Breaths
A Mark
Alexander’s Gold
Kismet
Appearance
Father’s Sleep
The Edges of Day
from Life like a Broken Narrative, 2004
The House After Her Death
Old Radio
Seven Bridges
Souvenir
The Ring from Qayrawan
Suhrawardi’s Handkerchief
A Postponed Poem from New York
Dog’s Tail
03-03-03
Something Like Anger, Like Betrayal
Clay Tablets
Preparing for Flight
The Phases of the Moon in London
Mimicking Mark Anthony
An Ordinary Conversation About Cancer
Neighbors
The Stars of London
Cavafy’s Mask
New Uncollected Poems 2008-2014
Petra: The Concealed Rose
If You’re Passing Through Rome
Don’t Do as the Romans Do
On the Way to You
By Chance as Well
Light
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
A Map of Signs and Scents: New and Selected Poems, 1979–2014
by Amjad Nasser translated by Fady Joudah and Khaled Mattawa
Northwestern University Press, 2016 Paper: 978-0-8101-3365-5 eISBN: 978-0-8101-3366-2
Featuring poems from earlier collections of Amjad Nasser’s work and many newer uncollected poems never made available in English, A Map of Signs and Scents introduces the work of an important Arabic poet to a broader contemporary Anglophone readership. This special annotation edition helps readers view the multifaceted contexts within which Nasser has created his award-winning poems.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
AMJAD NASSER was a leading Jordanian poet, essayist, and travel memoirist. One of the pioneers of the Arabic prose poem, he cofounded a number of Arabic publications. He died in 2019.
FADY JOUDAH is a poet, translator, and practicing physician of internal medicine. His first poetry collection, The Earth in the Attic, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007.
KHALED MATTAWA is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Michigan. He has authored four books of poetry.
REVIEWS
"A Map of Signs and Scents offers a compelling understanding of the inertia that propels the machinery of history—something few American poets attend to. This puts Nasser in conversation with internationally prominent poets such as Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, and Derek Walcott." —Wayne Miller, author of Post- and The City, Our City
"This collection of new translations of Jordanian Amjad Nasser’s poetry serves not only as a survey of his impressive body of work, but draws together poems that demonstrate Nasser’s invaluable contribution to the global poetic aesthetic of the late twentieth century and beyond. Rich in images and ideas that emerge from the specific but speak to the universal, A Map of Signs and Scents is the perfect volume to experience Nasser’s poetry for the first time." —World Literature Today
"Amjad Nasser’s poems create new structures of the mind and heart. You find yourself not so much reading these pages as walking through them: line by line, poem after poem turns its phrase-corners to offer some new revelation, some reordered arrangement of the real. A Map of Signs and Scents extends the geography of the human in every dimension." —Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
"The sensibility of the Near East is in every line, the flavor and longing, the memories are like no other; yet he’s compared favorably to Celan, Cavafy, Borges, Neruda, in classic structure and sensuality. Nasser’s best gift is the ability to fold the ancient within the troubled 'present' with philosophical discourse and pungent imagery. Personal love, and love for this world, with all its sorrows, in lyric and poetic prose, show this man as a Master of the word in any language." —Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
“The work of Amjad Nasser forms passages in and out of time, qualities of light and darkness, images that are never only images but sentences built on and out of the density and delicacy of his beloved and mysterious red stone city of Petra, place of living memory whose deepest origins remain secret. His poems are dramatic but the drama is built into the phrasing, the turning of the verses, the relentless nature of what comes at you from within and without, the primordial and newly minted, all at once. Stopped by Homeland Security before even reaching the border on his only attempted visit to the United States, Nasser’s work truly comes from another world, one whose rhythms and texture we have long suppressed or destroyed.” —Ammiel Alcalay, author of a little history and from the warring factions
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
from Praise for Another Café, 1979
Gates to the Sky, but They Are Narrow
from Climbing the Mountain Since Gilead, 1981
Song
Grandfather
One Flower
Shoes
The Bleating of Copper
from Shepherds of Solitude, 1986
Exile
Drums
Bent Branches
Loneliness
Fever
Shade Plants
Eleven Planets for Asia
Shepherds of Solitude
from The Strangers Arrive, 1990
Chance
The Strangers Arrive
The Impending Hour
Lines to Joseph
The Lion
from Joy to All Who See You, 1994
Invocation for Entering the House
The Scent Reminds
A Rose of Black Lace
Invocation
The Sun Flung Its Golden Incisors at Me
The Lover’s Ascent
fromAscent of Breath, 1997
A Dusk Foretold
Ascent of Breath
from Whenever He Saw a Sign, 1998
Meritocracy
Haiku Breaths
A Mark
Alexander’s Gold
Kismet
Appearance
Father’s Sleep
The Edges of Day
from Life like a Broken Narrative, 2004
The House After Her Death
Old Radio
Seven Bridges
Souvenir
The Ring from Qayrawan
Suhrawardi’s Handkerchief
A Postponed Poem from New York
Dog’s Tail
03-03-03
Something Like Anger, Like Betrayal
Clay Tablets
Preparing for Flight
The Phases of the Moon in London
Mimicking Mark Anthony
An Ordinary Conversation About Cancer
Neighbors
The Stars of London
Cavafy’s Mask
New Uncollected Poems 2008-2014
Petra: The Concealed Rose
If You’re Passing Through Rome
Don’t Do as the Romans Do
On the Way to You
By Chance as Well
Light
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
