Spectres of Exile and Other Poems

Spectres of Exile is a bilingual edition of poems by one of the Arab Gulf region’s most prominent poets. Hasan Abdallah al-Qurashi comes from the Hijaz, the birthplace of Arabic poetry, and fellow poets have linked him to the great Hijazi poets of the pre-Islamic period and the seventh and eighth centuries AD.
Al-Qurashi writes love poems in which the pain and difficulty of love are invariably portrayed through imagery relating to the natural hazards of the desert and the nomadic way of life, in keeping with the conventions of his literary forebears.
He also writes about the fate of a poet who is the spokesman for his people and an indivisible part of them, but at the same time an outcast, an exile and a marginal figure. He evokes the beauty of the country to whose past and future he feels bound, but condemns the perversion of its supposedly cherished values and aspirations.