الناقد ناظم ناصر القريشي- الشعر هو الآن شجرة الحياة تأملات في ديوان (الهبوط إلى برج القوس) للشاعر د. حاتم الصكر

Nadhim Naser Al-Quraishi

The poetry is now the tree of life

Reflections on the poetry collection

(Descending into Sagittarius)

Poet: Hatim Alsager

“All art is a biography, and the pearl is the biography of the oyster” Federico Fellini.

Is poetry the ecstasy of being present in life itself…? Or is it another dimension in which we live with the ecstasy of poetry…?

In an attempt to embody life as an idea in the art of poetry, we follow the words of the poet Hatim Al-Siqer in the time that past, but they are in our hands in the present time of his collection (Descending into Sagittarius), published by Arumah House for Studies, Translation and Publishing in 2020.

Poetry is the time being, and this collection with its ultimate idea is for contemplation. It is similar to “The Tree of Life” movie by director Terrence Malik, and perhaps some thoughts of time from the space’s odyssey come back to it. The poet Hatim Al-Siqer begins by presenting significant wide literary, as if he is confirming an idea that he previously believed in. This intensive and wide intellectual thinking is in the form of poetry, with its continuous images and parallel ideas, as if it were a magical force that summoned the spirit of poetry, or a spell cast on the words, we will see them grow, rebel, expand, and take a shape in the poems of the collection.

 

 

As a start, we will find that the title, which is the gateway to the collection, and not saying its threshold, is a beautiful innovation for the movement of cinematic action in poetry, accompanied by soundtrack music supporting the action of landing, which can create a text or performance for a future life. The poet used the vocal performance of the words and the movement of the poetic image, which makes the recipient, predicts what will happen during the landing and later on. This is what this music generates, dominated by the majestic rhythm as if it is coming from another dimension’s depth. The title sentence contained the tracks of the music in its small details.

 

Biography of poetry

Poet begins to write the scenario of life under the influence of the ecstasy of poetry and its inspiration, by conjuring up his favorite characters. He writes about them or for them, with a critical engineering, that is always in contact with poetry, so their eloquent and presence represented with vitality. Through this ionic presence (as poetry is the ionic state of words), continues dramatic thoughts is contained and revealed, full of poetry, humanity, and emotional depth. We will see other ideas parallel to this idea in his portraits that he will later draw in the form of poetry, and we will find that the poet and his work have merged in the vision. So that absence takes the place of presence, so the tree of poetry glows and leaves an anxious rebellion, so he writes about Al-Mutanabbi, the rebel Rambo, the innovator Al-Sayyab, the transformative Adonis, Abdul Aziz Al-Maqaleh, Amjad Nasser, and Hasab Al-Shaikh Jaafar:

 

• Al-Mutanabbi

The poetry

Your book to this world

• Passing through his space (anxiously) and over the wind’ horse.

His kings surround your steps

And his women

And his poets

And his money changers

Were you – in the childhood of the flame, making dreams from the clay of the Euphrates –

Then you watering it with blood and tears

 

Gilgamesh who never leave

Through epic scenes, the poet records his Sumerian torment and his eagerness to quench his thirst, and the torment that will flow and repeated between the intervals and images, as if it were music to his soul and what the abundance of words goes. For his days are like gravel and his body has no room for a wound, and then this terrifying surreal image emerges, which embodied the harshness of reality and mixed simile with metaphor of gasping and dying, the planes howl like hungry wolves. He resorts to Gilgamesh and his epic, which is like coupling the secret with the concealment of the example.

So he shares the crusty loaves of bread with him, and when he wakes up, he finds that the snake has stolen his grass. Is it his destiny that written on him always and he is still in a tragic repetition of the life circle. It is as if what happened before is happening now. Perhaps the snake in the first epic was real, but in the second, it is a symbol, which suggests something else, so the poet says in the poem The Sumerian Tormentor:

He did not die of thirst

But he is not satisfied yet

His days are like gravel

His body has no room for wound

He takes refuge in the ziggurat of Ur

Pursued by (allied) aircraft

Howling like hungry wolves

He falls asleep

He shares the crusty loaves of bread with Gilgamesh

When he wakes up

He finds that the snake has stolen his grass

 

The art of poetic composition

Poet Hatim Al-Siqer begins to transform the poetic style into plastic art, and he represents the idea of drawing. He draws poetic portraits in plastic language, and music will accompany it, like a dream extending over the bow of the violin, to fall tones on the delicate white ivory keys of the piano. To pass the idea to the black keys with the ecstasy of presence, and the ecstasy of the tones that rise as footnotes on the margin of meaning, while the poet immersed with his work. The violin speaks about the dream and the piano achieves its presence with the words. Thus, the music grows like a dreams tree that may come true as it passes through the words that painted the portraits. In the first painting, the poet depicts the woman’s sadness for her husband, as she weaves the waiting wool and her sight in the wind and with the it the sad silence music goes. In the second painting, he writes about and to the poet Abd al-Razzaq al-Rubaie, drawing the footsteps of Gilgamesh searching for immortality as he crosses an invisible river flowing in his loneliness desert:

 

Gilgamesh’s footsteps

(To the poet: Abdul Razzaq Al-Rubaie… and about him)

 

As he walks

He imagines that he is crossing an invisible river

With Gilgamesh doubled steps

His spidery beard framed his sad face

Illuminated by a poem at night

Collect in early morning

Its ashes, on the only rug in his room

It climbs with great difficulty into his besieged mouth

With sadness and the blackness of his bushy beard

Half of it is lost on the way to his height

He walks a voiding dead fish

In an invisible river flowing in the desert of his loneliness

In the poem “The Death of an Arabic Teacher”, which is the second part of the elegies that linger in the text space, we will find that the poet Al-Siqer regained his feelings under the strong impressions of Picasso’s paintings in his blue phase. He managed the scene by exporting the feeling of distress, anxiety, tension and sadness, discovering the idea of death feeling that he developed in the shape of the words drawn in the poem. Despite its simplicity, it is sharp and harsh, and all that remained of it was an echo of a bitter life before moments ago, as indicated by the feeling accompanying the words. Here the poem becomes darker, enveloped in the blue color, and is accompanied by blue music from an old guitarist:

.. the man

He died

His hands (clasped)

His body (erected)

His legs (broken)

As for the heart

It was (still)

…tied to his rib cage..

.. In the evening

Only the grave was (open)

And everything

Behind the end.

(Still) without movement

Creating mythology

The poem of “The Descending into Sagittarius”, we can find the transformation, to entre from emptiness to the formation and then existence in action and form. Perhaps the poet believes in myths, so he invented a shortened and condensed mythology, and he realized the novelty of its fascination and made of it a space for the story, telling the hypothesis of its origin, with an emotional and dramatic effect that matches the entry to the unknown in life. Life is scary and strange, but it is full of things. Every person has his own legend, and this is the poetic code, charming and captivating, that the poet entrusted in his poem, and intensified the meanings with it, as if it were an endless repetition, so it is a return to my birth again:

Descending…to Sagittarius

 [To my birthday again]

I left in the morning

Clinging to a peasant’s placenta

I landed it from Baghdad

Wooden buses

Farm drought

And locusts

In general, it is dying

As if I was waiting for the guns to be silent

And the middle of the century

The five children were completed

Before they became a poor dozen

Thus

-And the rain floods the streets

December becomes colder and paler

I left in the morning

Skinny… like a spiny bird

Always to live in a broken Sagittarius

But.. in front of the lines

In the morning queues tormented by sleepiness and hunger

And the cold

The poet Hatim Al-Siqer concludes his collection “Descending into Sagittarius”, as he began it, with significant wide literary. The concluding statement in which he affirms that poetry is the restoration of life, and although the poet in this collection undoubtedly filled with pain and a sense of loss, he went through poetry and life with the sanctity of a warrior searching for the secrets depth. He raised his poetic sentence high to search for salvation, while observing this universe.

By Nadhim Naser Al-Quraishi

Translated by: Dr. Eman Noori Ali

Sincerely Thanks:

Faleeha Hassan.