'Silence that Remains' introduces readers in the UK for the first time to Zaqtan's early work, including his debut collection destroyed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Writing about personal memory as a form of political and social activism, while avoiding the mythology of exile and displacement, Ghassan creates an aesthetic of fragments, an imaginative archaeology of fragile human subjects. It's a book about the silence of the tongue and the silence of the heart, the silence of resistance and the resistance of silence
Ghassan Zaqtan Boeken
Ghassan Zaqtan is een Palestijnse dichter wiens werk zich verdiept in de ingewikkelde landschappen van identiteit, geheugen en verbanning. Zijn poëzie wordt gekenmerkt door een diepe lyrische kwaliteit en een rijk tapijt van metaforen, die de complexiteit van de Palestijnse ervaring met universele resonantie onderzoeken. Zaqtans kenmerkende stijl verweeft meesterlijk persoonlijke verhalen met bredere culturele en politieke contexten, en biedt lezers een diep gevoelde en blijvende literaire visie.




Where the Bird Disappeared
- 96bladzijden
- 4 uur lezen
This lyrical novel, set in the surroundings of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya, weaves a narrative rich in sensory detail yet troubled by the porousness of memory. It tells the story of the relationship between two figures of deep mythical resonance in the region, Yahya and Zakariyya, figures who live in the present but bear the names--and many traits--of two saints. Ranging from today into back to pre-1948 Palestine, the book presents both a compelling portrait of a contemporary village and a sacred geography that lies beyond and beneath the present state of the world. Sensual, rich in allusion, yet at the same time focused on the struggles of today, Where the Bird Disappeared is a powerful novel of both connection and dispossession.
A highly anticipated edition of Zaqtan's work from 2014 to 2020, all in English for the first time. Ghassan Zaqtan is not only one of the most significant Palestinian poets at work today, but one of the most important poets writing in Arabic. Since the publication of his first collection in 1980, Zaqtan's presence as a poet has evolved with the same branching and cumulative complexity as his poems--an invisible system of roots insistently pushing through the impacted soil of political and national narratives. Strangers in Light Coats is the third collection of Zaqtan's poetry to appear in English. It brings together poems written between 2014 and 2020 drawn from six volumes of poetry. Catching and holding the smallest particles of observation and experience in their gravity, the poems sprout and grow as though compelled, a trance of process in which fable, myth, and elegy take form only to fall apart and reconfigure, each line picked apart by the next and brought into the new body.
"Originally published in Arabic in 1995"--Title page verso.