Fugitive Atlas by Khaled Mattawa

Khaled Mattawa’s Fugitive Atlas is filled with poems of war and forced emigration. He shows northern Africa in idyllic times, and contrasts the devastation and human toll of the recent past. There are so many paths one could try to escape horror, and Mattawa shows us many of them with great humanity and weight. These are poems that transport, and show transport. Mattawa’s style is slow and meditative, reminiscent of great poetry from the mid-1900’s: Cavafy, Pavese, Montale, Milosz. . . It deserves its place among these giants. Buy here.

From “Seasons of Migration o the North”

. . . Addis to the source of the Nile, / the Khartoum to Sinai, to be / an asylum in Tel Aviv, or northwest // through Darfur and Sadha, / to the Bride of the Med. Names / like shabby trees on a map, // lines for a screen where bodies / are stick figures dancing / to tepid applause. Each a degree // in a circle inside a void, unmarked / time, days like scentless leaves / that slip through your hands.

From “Psalm Under Siege”

Speak me, speak the fuel / I tossed into the fire: my dead / daughter’s bed and books. // Recall ancestors who raided / hovels, dug up stored grains / packed into perfect cones. . .

From “The Boat Merchant’s Wife”

. . . One night I asked how strong / they were, how many they carry. / “It’s all in the booklet,” he said, // “no reason for what keeps happening to them.” He sipped from a glass / of bokha and explained how // from this same jetty, long before / the Arabs and Vandals, even before / the Romans and their famous theater, // boats filled with people and goods / and sailed off. A day or a week later, / the sea sends back the drowned. . .