Jhon Heath – Stubbs​

Is a respected British poet, and also a critic, anthologist classical scholar and translator.



Spectres of exile is a bilinguai edition of poems by one of the Areb Gulf ragion’s most prominent poets. Hasan Abdullah Al-Qurashi comes from the Hijaz, the birthplace of Arabic poetry, and fellow poets have linked him to the great Hijazi poetry of the pre-Islamic period and the seventh and eighth centuries AD.
According to the Egypting writer and man of letters Taha Husain, A newness and ease in the language of al-Qurashi’s poetry makes it accessible . . . at the same time a touch of the calm wisdom of the desert in it is reminiscent of earlier Hijazi poetry.
Al-Qurashi writes love poems in which the pain and difficulty of love are incariably portrayed through imagery relating to the matural hazards of the desert and the nomadic way of life, in keeping with the conventions of his literary forebears.
He also write about the fate of a poet who is a spokesmen for his people and an indivisible part of them, but at the same time an outcast, an exile and a marginal figure. He evokes the beauty of the country to whose past and future he feels bound, but condemns the perversion of its supposedly cherished values and aspirations. As the egyption poet Salah Abd al-Sabur write, Al-Qurashi is not content with the society in which he lives so he criticizes and condemns it. . . but his protest is invariably poetic and pure.