In a war-scarred land lie seeds of beauty

The Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali earns a living selling souvenirs in an old part of Nazareth, not far from his native village of Saffuriyya — or rather, not far from the site where it once stood. Muhammad Ali's village was flattened by bombs dropped by the Israel Defense Forces in 1948, and its farmlands later dispersed to settlers. Muhammad Ali was 17 at the time. For him and other Palestinians, the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 is remembered as the "great catastrophe."

Author Appearances

Taha Muhammad Ali reads from "So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005," 7:30 p.m., Saturday, Saint Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, 1245 10th Ave. E., Seattle, and 7 p.m. Sunday, Wheeler Theater, Fort Worden State Park, Port Townsend; both free (360-385-4925 or www.coppercanyonpress.org/tahatour).

Recently, when Muhammad Ali's new book "So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005" (Copper Canyon, 197 pp., $18) was shipped to translator Peter Cole's home in Jerusalem, missiles were flying between Lebanon and Israel. Cole wanted to deliver copies to the poet, but was advised it was not safe to go to Nazareth, which had been targeted in the attacks.

War and its misery form the background and sometimes the substance of Muhammad Ali's poetry. Even so, his words are chosen with love and a transcendent kind of joy that knows how to co-exist with sorrow. This bilingual edition of his work lets readers discover it both in Arabic and in English translation. As you can see in the opening lines of "Twigs," the poetry is fresh and captivating:

Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life's brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes
to an end,
and for the thought that one might
suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child ...

Translator Cole says the Arabic term for Muhammad Ali's approach to poetry is Al-sahil al-mumtani'a, meaning "a difficult, elusive, or even inscrutable simplicity." That casual-seeming ease is, in this poet, a mark of greatness. Muhammad Ali is a clever storyteller. He can lull an audience into going along with an amusing anecdote until we are caught in a metaphor that is far from comfortable. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the title piece of the book, "So What."

Call it a prose poem or a short story — the category doesn't matter. It begins as a tale of a boy who has no shoes, who is unfairly mocked and tormented at school and also wounded by the sharp metal, thorns and stones that life puts in his path.

Still, he has a greater connection to the earth and the things he encounters than other children, because his sensitive feet are in direct contact with treasures — old coins, ancient Roman glass, marbles, keys — that others step over unwittingly. But his parents are dirt poor and the boy suffers from a desire that grows until it overwhelms him. The end of the tale comes as shock — and offers a compassionate insight into human nature and international relations.

In a note on the translation, Cole writes that in English the word "poet" derives from the Greek poieein — "to make or fashion" — while in Arabic, the word for poet is sha'ir, "one who knows through feeling."

Taha Muhammad Ali feels deeply. He has lived with profound loss. He knows violence and bloodshed, yet his poems lead toward understanding. As he writes in "Twigs":

And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people's
hearts.

Sheila Farr is The Seattle Times art critic.