Poets and Poems: Yahia Lababidi and "Desert Songs"

For millennia, the desert has been a place of both severity and serenity. Its landscape – stark, unyielding, and often brutal – entices as often as it repels. It is a place that allows life only to that which can adapt to its harsh conditions. It is this “life stripped to bare essentials” that has attracted hermits, prophets, and seers. Three of the world’s major religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – began in or adjacent to a desert landscape. The Bible and the Koran are filled with desert imagery and stories. 

It is to the desert, writes Yahia Lababidi in the preface to his newest collection of poems, Desert Songs, that he would periodically visit to empty himself of the noise of Cairo and lose himself. These pilgrimages of purification and renewal were underscored, he said, by the sense that he would find a part of himself that he would not find anywhere else.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.