Araby
- Book Review,
by Eric Ormsby
Boston Review
Ormsby reaffirms his fealty to not only the best words, but also, often, the most luxurious and exquisite ones.
David O'Meara - National Post - June 9, 2001
Few poets write like this. You would do well to read Araby.
David Helwig, Montreal Gazette.
A virtuoso display of vocabulary, the poems break through to a luminous clarity. Araby is a clever and brave book.
Norman Dodge, Books in Canada
Ormsby is a most talented poet...one of the handful of the best meditative poets writing in the English language.
Ben Downing, The New Criterion
Ormsby carries [Wallace] Stevens’s mantle with rightness...The master’s curlicues, minute textures, his ear for the inner harmonies of English.
John Updike
Ormsby’s reverent attention to things as they are lights up his every page with a glow.
W.J. Keith, Books in Canada - October, 2001
Audaciousness of language that has not been heard in Canadian poetry since the time of E.J. Pratt and A.M. Klein.
Library Journal
A master of the poetry of sheer observation.
Book Description
Araby is a new collection of poems on the adventures, dreams, hopes, and imaginings of two singular characters: Jaham, the "Father of Clouds," a semi-nomadic poet and auto mechanic, and his inseparable sidekick Bald Adham, also a virtuoso mechanic as well as pillar of Muslim piety. With sly linguistic exuberance these poems recount the lives and deaths of Jaham and Adham and evoke the difficult terrain they share, not only with camels, wolves, and vultures, but with the mysterious jinn, beings of pure fire.
From the Publisher
Eric Ormsby's poetry has appeared The New Yorker, The New Republic, Paris Review, Parnassus, and is anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Poetry. His last book, For a Modest God: New and Selected Poems (1997), was published by Grove Press. In 1992 he received the prestigious Ingram Merrill Foundation Prize for "out-standing work as a poet." Eric Ormsby has been Curator of Islamic Manuscripts at Princeton University, Directory of Libraries at Catholic University of America, and a chef trainee at New York's legendary Brasserie restaurant. He is currently a professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, Montreal.
About the Author
Eric Ormsby's poetry has appeared in most of the major journals in Canada, England, and the U.S., including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Paris Review, Descant, and Parnassus. His first collection, Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems won the 1991 QSPELL Poetry Prize, and in the following year he received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award for "outstanding work as a poet." His last book, For a Modest God: New and Selected Poems (1997), was published with Grove Press in New York. Eric Ormsby is a professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University and has traveled widely in the Arab world.
Excerpted from Araby by Eric Ormsby. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
JAHAM SAYS ADHAM'S BEADS This was his rosary of olive wood
Whose ninety-nine black beads hang from a cord.
He bought it on pilgrimage, while still a child,
And always it looped down from his grimy hand. The rosary's repose is serpentine.
It lies in its fat black coils in asp encirclings
And viper-rippling rings
And when I pick it up the dark disks click Between my fingers as I breathe the names
God gave Himself before the world began.
Creator, Fashioner, Immortal One,
Enduring, Living, Mighty, Merciful... The strand yields to my impatient hand
with staccato softness of its vocatives:
Victorious, Compassionate, O Listener!
Resurrecting and Extinguishing, Unique! But I pray better with the voiced
Beads of the rosary, and not with names.
My supplication's in my fingertip
That slides the awed wood down the hidden thread.
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