Adonis's poetry and prose writings have aroused much controversy in the Arab world, both for their provocative content and their arresting style. Grounded in traditional poetic styles, Adonis developed a new way of expressing modern sentiments. Although influenced by classical poets, Adonis started at a relatively early age to experiment with the prose poem, giving it density, tension, metaphors, and rhythm. He also broke with the diction and style of traditional poems, introducing a new and powerful syntax and new imagery. Through his innovative use of language, imagery, and narrative technique, Adonis has played a leading role in the revolutionizing of Arabic literature. He has garnered many of the world’s major poetry prizes. In A Time Between Ashes and Roses Adonis evokes the wisdom of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, liberally excerpting from and remolding its images; the modernism of William Carlos Williams; and the haunting urban imagery of poets such as Baudelaire, Cavafy, and Lorca. Three long poems allow him to explore profoundly the human condition, by examining language and love, race and favor, faith and dogma, war and ruin. In the lyrical “This Is My Name” and “Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings,” Adonis ponders Arab defeat and defeatism. In “A Grave for New York,” he reflects on the same theme by interrogating Vietnam-era America. This bilingual edition, presenting the poems in Arabic and English on facing pages, is enhanced by a critical bibliography of Adonis’s works, providing an accessible and crucial reference for scholars of modern and Middle Eastern poetry and culture. Shawkat M. Toorawa’s vivid and eloquent translation finally makes the poet’s signature work available to an English-speaking audience; the effect is no less powerful than were the first translations of Pablo Neruda into English.

"Frontispiece: Poem and calligraphy by Adonis, XXXX. Translated by Bassam Frangieh" --T.p. verso.

One of the greatest poets of Arabic literature, Adonis's work often centres on the process of petic creation, but his work has somehow remained highly appealing to Arab readers, and he has had, perhaps, more influence in terms of innovation and modernity than any other contemporary Arab poet. Twice he has been a finalist for the Nobel Prize. For Adonis, poetry is a vision, a leap outside of established concepts, a change in the order of things and the way we look at them.''

Calling poetry a "question that begets another question," Adonis sets into motion this stream of unending inquiry with difficult questions about exile, identity, language, politics, and religion. Repeatedly mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate, Adonis is a leading figure in twentieth-century Arabic poetry. Restless and relentless, Adonis explores the pain and otherness of exile, a state so complete that absence replaces identity and becomes the exile's only presence. Exile can take many forms for the Arabic poet, who must practice his craft as an outsider, separated not only from the nation of his birth but from his own language; in the present as in the past, that exile can mean censorship, banishment, or death. Through these poems, Adonis gives an exquisite voice to the silence of absence.

What happens when a former Zen Buddhist monk and his feminist wife experience an apparition of the Virgin Mary? “This book could not have come at a more auspicious time, and the message is mystical perfection, not to mention a courageous one. I adore this book.”—Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit Before a vision of a mysterious “Lady” invited Clark Strand and Perdita Finn to pray the rosary, they were not only uninterested in becoming Catholic but finished with institutional religion altogether. Their main spiritual concerns were the fate of the planet and the future of their children and grandchildren in an age of ecological collapse. But this Lady barely even referred to the Church and its proscriptions. Instead, she spoke of the miraculous power of the rosary to transform lives and heal the planet, and revealed the secrets she had hidden within the rosary’s prayers and mysteries—secrets of a past age when forests were the only cathedrals and people wove rose garlands for a Mother whose loving presence was as close as the ground beneath their feet. She told Strand and Finn: The rosary is My body, and My body is the body of the world. Your body is one with that body. What cause could there be for fear? Weaving together their own remarkable story of how they came to the rosary, their discoveries about the eco-feminist wisdom at the heart of this ancient devotion, and the life-changing revelations of the Lady herself, the authors reveal an ancestral path—available to everyone, religious or not—that returns us to the powerful healing rhythms of the natural world.

The remarkable story of a small, makeshift library in the town of Daraya, and the people who found hope and humanity in its books during a four-year siege. Daraya lies on the fringe of Damascus, just southwest of the Syrian capital. Yet for four years it lived in another world. Besieged by government forces early in the Syrian Civil War, its people were deprived of food, bombarded by heavy artillery, and under the constant fire of snipers. But deep beneath this scene of frightening devastation lay a hidden library. While the streets above echoed with shelling and rifle fire, the secret world below was a haven of books. Long rows of well-thumbed volumes lined almost every wall: bloated editions with grand leather covers, pocket-sized guides to Syrian poetry, and no-nonsense reference books, all arranged in well-ordered lines. But this precious horde was not bought from publishers or loaned by other libraries--they were the books salvaged and scavenged at great personal risk from the doomed city above. The story of this extraordinary place and the people who found purpose and refuge in it is one of hope, human resilience, and above all, the timeless, universal love of literature and the compassion and wisdom it fosters.