Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece
Pocket Poets Series No. 64
by Nasser Rabah (Author), Ammiel Alcalay (Translator), Emna Zghal (Translator), Khalid al-Hilli (Translator)
City Lights
July 2025, $17.95, 208 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0872869127
In his Foreword to Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, the Palestinian scholar Mosab Abu Toha writes, “If I were to pick only one poet from Gaza to be translated and published in the English-speaking world” it would be Nasser Rabah. “His metaphors are like raindrops pouring over me after a long summer,” Abu Toha writes, and goes on to extol the musicality of Rabah’s lines. Translated from the Arabic by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal and Khaled Al-Hilli, the poems are presented on facing pages in their original Arabic script and in English translation.
In the Afterword, the translators explain that since this is Nasser Rabah’s first collection in translation, they wanted to provide as broad an entry as they could to the poet. The bilingual edition is for Arabic readers unfamiliar with the poet as much as the American English translation is for a Western audience. The poems are presumably a sampling, therefore, from all of his published works across his career. Certainly we get an idea of his style and outlook.
After the eponymous poem with its refrain, “The poem said its piece, and moved on,” the collection ends with seven recent poems, all dated, from November 19, 2023 (“Statues of Flesh and Blood”) to April 12, 2024 (“Plaza of Flesh”). These are all written after Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza. Inevitably they address that brutal reality. The poem “Rage,” dated March 13, 2024, includes the lines:
This then is what war makes of you, it takes off your skin and
gives you a tent, and like a crumpled piece of paper, it throws
your home out with the trash, it picks your pink heart, and
plants gunpowder stones, no wheat fields gleam in your eyes
from now on, no hills of olive groves dream to be picked…
“Plaza of Ash,” the final poem in the collection and the most recently written, concludes with the lines:
O Gaza, accursed, beloved, deranged, oppressed, outcast,
enchanted, forgotten, mentioned a thousand times
in the Book of War, you’re not the Goddess of the Dead,
nor is your book called Sorrow of the Country.
The poems that precede these final ones do have their moments of horror and austerity, but the predominant mood is spiritual and surrealistic, even playful. In “Radiance of the Ordinary” he asks, “What wisdom is there in a hunter setting traps in the form of poems?” Or take the title of another poem, “What I Didn’t Say to Me.” It makes you smile. Or, later in the same multi-part “Radiance of the Ordinary,” several of whose verse sections begin with these Zen-like questions, he asks:
How does my heart commit pardon while unbuttoning
the shirt? This is how I put the necklace of innocence to sleep
under the pillow of desire, I squeeze two grape clusters of
shadow into the mouth of thirst.
This sounds almost saucy, suggestive, certainly sensuous, at once tactile and appealing to the nose and to the tongue. It feels as much an expression of a joie de vivre as a cri de Coeur.
It also sounds “wise.” Nasser Rabah is often aphoristic, especially in the longer poems like “Small Fragments” and “Meditations” and “Background Music for Life” and this one, “What I Didn’t Say to Me.” In “Small Fragments” he writes: “Homes in war are eaten up by sorrow.” And in a later fragment:
The cypress dreamt the cloud was flirting,
and so longed for it.
It reached and reached,
but the passing cloud
was the stream’s lover,
and soil’s fate.
This sounds almost like the summary of an ancient myth, full of a kind of ageless wisdom. Indeed, dreams appear throughout the poems, potent and provocative. Later in “Small Fragments” he writes: “I dreamt you as a rose in my hand, / and waited the morning long….”
“The Blind Man’s Cane” begins with an allusion to dreaming and continues to feel surrealistic as it proceeds:
Just like the texture of a dream I forget upon awaking
like the taste of a balcony nobody looks out from,
I drink a street and go,
I lean on false statements and stray further,
a blind man with a cane made of blind memories.
“Nocturnal Spirits” is another example of this surreal dream atmosphere, It begins:
Discarded clothes come out at night,
they roam around in cold rooms,
wearing the words of their owners,
they love, they hate, they scream,
they go back to sleep before the rising racket.
With this sort of ambience, this mood, it’s not a surprise that God and angels make frequent appearances in Nasser Rabah’s poems. Indeed, in the very first poem of the collection, “Prelude,” he writes:
O Lord….
This my soul, ripened in God’s alphabet when you said to me:
Be—then the poem flowed, hastening to its completion, where
perfection is an end.
Steeped in the spiritual imagery of ancient Middle Eastern religions, Nasser Rabah’s poems are populated with angels (“Angels of Old,” “Little Angels”) and God (“A Balcony Hanging in the Sky,” “Ascension,” “Stewing My Groans”; God is all over the place in “Meditations” and “What I Didn’t Say to Me” – “Be Tom Hanks and say: God! Everything is great, guys.”).
Oddly, or perhaps not, Nasser Rabah’s spirituality makes me think of Leonard Cohen. Maybe it’s those Zen-like questions (“Why do the details of things cough at night?” he asks in “Background Music for Life”). Or maybe it’s his vision of himself: “I am the prophet who lost his prophecy,” he writes in “Prophet of the Lost Way,” and later in the poem writes, “Die a little, and give me my first kiss: a star / to lean on and herd my pain with.” As with Cohen, there’s a real humility in his insight.
But war, indeed, is never far from his mind. How could it be? “In war, time commits suicide,” he writes in “In the Endless War,” and the poem concludes:
In war you’re not made of flesh and bones, you’re someone
else in the same clothes bloodied, dirty, and lying –
testifying that you’re not dead yet.
Nasser Rabah’s own home was destroyed in the relentless Israeli bombing, we learn in the Afterword. In a video clip he holds a copy of War and Peace pulled from the rubble of his library, talk about irony – his home “thrown out with the trash,” indeed.
The title poem ends with a New Testament allusion:
The poem said its piece and moved on. Now I sit listless
counting my wounds on my fingers, how many of my soldiers
remain, regret my only captive, my boon companion,
and the bread of my last supper.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.