Böcker av Omar Sabbagh

RIP is located in a world of loss.Waddah Faris was Omar Sabbagh's maternal uncle. He was an artist, a nomad, a man who 'embossed' himself on those he knew, a person who '...when he walked into a room / God switched-on his camera' ('Charisma'). Above all, Waddah Faris was loved: 'People loved you because they knew you, and knew, too, / that kindness for you was inevitable, a lit fuse. / You lived your life like a full-bodied wish, careless with your care,' ('Life With Style'). His loss is enormous and for the poet and his family that loss is deeply personal. Those dying in Gaza are so many that the particularity of death is too easily subsumed in overwhelm. We can hardly fathom the enormity of the daily horror. The loss of a whole people leaves us aghast and '...when it comes to a starless catastrophe / like this, and all your tools go numb,' ('Losing Vocab') we need to ask what kind of world we are living in, how we got here and how we lend our support to the suffering. Moving between these two losses-each personal, each urgent, Omar Sabbagh asks us to care. He asks us to dare to look into the face of a child who, limbless, 'smiles at this father', who in the worst of worlds, continues to find joy, hope and love, 'This child of sheer perfect music, blow after blow after blow.' ('This Child Of Utter Song'). He asks that we see, '...people / just like me-with needs and desires, with projects / and hopes and fears-dying.' and ask ourselves, 'Who will protect / them? Because only that is real.' ('The Delusion')

"A thought-provoking collection that delves into the depths of human emotions, relationships, and the power of language and art, often depicting a sense of longing, loss, and the search for meaning. The poems highlight the consequences of missed opportunities, the weight of regret, and the realisation of one's own limitations. And they explore the transformative power of love-the relationship between the poet and his daughter, Alia, being a recurring theme. Through rich imagery and introspective reflections, Omar Sabbagh invites readers to contemplate the complexities of existence."- Adam Wyeth, Associate Artist, Civic Theatre Dublin"It's always gripping when a writer turns the textual mirror on himself and starts to reflect on his own identity. For Echo is both a highly original poetry collection and a fascinating self-portrait. In it, Omar Sabbagh uses poetry and prose to challenge and dissect his own psyche: an examination more immediate and intimate than any scenes from a life. If Sabbagh's Echo is perhaps the ideal reader, in this book he allows us to see through an exceptional mind's eye. There we glimpse the poet as he turns towards, and away from, the mirror."- Fiona Sampson

Linguistically dexterous, scintillating with intelligence and wit, and balancing incisive observation with deep compassion, the short fictions in Y Knots draw us into the lives of characters we feel completely involved with. Here we have a hall of mirrors in which the writer mines his soul for images that reflect the story. But in interrogating the self, what Omar Sabbagh produces is an engaging array of unique perspectives on all our souls.If, as Sabbagh writes, writing is always a performance and projection of a self, then Y Knots is the performance of a self breath-takingly prodigious and heterodox. That Sabbagh is able to weave this self into characters whose tussles leap off the page so compellingly shows a master at work.- Peter Salmon, author of An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida¿¿¿Y Knots hold the Hanging Gardens of Babylon teleported into the tired aridity of a postmodern mind. The lushness of Sabbagh's characters and settings is nurtured with such loving drip-irrigation precision that you'll find yourself enamored with both his beauties and his beasts. - Svetlana Lavochkina, novelist, poet, translatorIntelligent and passionate, these stories are singularities that make all the difference. Sabbagh seems to be, as he describes one of his characters, 'an inexorably-thinking man', but there is a certain rawness and playfulness to the stories which makes the philosophical grounding often quite hilarious. Sabbagh is also a unique chronicler of the Middle East and globalization.- Adnan Mahmutovic, author of At the Feet of Mothers¿

Beautiful and personal meditation on fatherhood, marriage and bereavement.

A compilation of essays on literature, ranging from bona fide scholarly interventions, to reflective articles and review-essays which I deem to be of substantial enough worth.

But It Was An Important Failure is an insightful, lyrical and confessional harvest of engaging poetry.