A Horse at the Door

Wadih Saadeh

An English language survey of works by the celebrated Lebanese poet, drawing from collections published between 1968 and 2012.

Reading Wadih Saadeh, in this inspiring translation by Robin Moger, one finds oneself entering the aftershocks of an imagination devastated by war and the deep internal and external exiles that follow such destruction. His poetry, loose and open—attentive and philosophical—lives in the remnants of what is left, of what survives to tell its tales, in both short-form, slightly surreal parables, and longer autobiographic tracings. It speaks of dust, of being dust, of stones talking to stones, of separated limbs and shadows walking their own way, clinging to shapes, of being water, of being rubble, new languages learnt, friendships, and tobacco at the source of a breath. Of travelling without arrival. Of moving without settling. As though one is forever seeking to settle but one doesn’t know how, or into what form. In the end, the poet settles on passing, and finds aliveness in its slightest movements. Like passing one’s hand through one’s hair, as he does it in the closing sequence of his ground-breaking poem from the Lebanese civil war. An extraordinary and painfully timely collection.