"All exile now", says Adnan al-Sayegh in his poem 'Ulysses', is a prison without walls. This tension - the relief at having found safety and the grief and pain at the loss of your home, your family and your friends - is the driving force behind his extraordinary poetry in translation series. Al-Sayegh, one of Iraqu's foremost poets, fled his homeland in 1993. The emotional force of the poem is tremendous by their very subject-matter.
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Al-Sayegh composed his first poetry when he was a child. Swimming in the Euphrates, he would recite as if talking to a friend in the water, and he spoke in colloquial rather than classical, Arabic. You get a sense, reading his poems, of the power and dynamism of water - its rhythm. This dexterity keeps the reader moving, distributing the emotional weight of his work throughout his supple and fluid lines.
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The title poem of the collection is a long sequence of seventeen sections, each one written in another city, another continent. Each poem is signed off with where it was written - Yemen, Damascus, Khartoum, Hyde Park Gardens - and the locations themselves become part of the poem, part of the poet's weary journey. His voice, though, remains taut and defiant.
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