Poetry
اعتذار للطفولة
Not translated into English
Hamda Khamis · 1978
Synopsis
The poet's first collection; she had been publishing her poems in the press since the late sixties. The critic Alawi al-Hashimi describes this early poetry as an intimate emotion brought to bear on the great questions of existence and society, served by the interior monologue and the plurality of voices. Love there confronts social reality, amid anxiety and doubt, and the figure of the mother runs through even the political poems, in unrhymed verse.
Context
The collection appeared in Bahrain from Dar al-Ghad in 1978, nine years after the publication of the poet's first essays under the title Shazaya, Fragments. It opens a body of work followed by collections published in Beirut, Amman and the Emirates. The journal Nizwa ranks the author among the pioneers of modern Gulf poetry, and stresses the place that femininity, the mother, the lover and the daughter hold in it.
Who it is for
Poems in Arabic, with no translation of the collection; other poems by the author have been translated.
Prizes and reception
The book opens the body of work of a pioneer, studied by Alawi al-Hashimi in his research on Bahraini poetry.