So What: New and Selected Poems

Despite his spare output and lack of formal education, Ali has become one of the most widely admired Palestinian poets. Composed in a synthetic Arabic that draws both on classical language and colloquial speech, Ali's vivid free verse conveys the moody resilience of his personality in treatments of the national grief of occupation, exile and the Palestinian Arabs' "endless migration." Often informed by symbols and structures from Arab tradition, Ali's ironies stand alongside easily grasped, even universal, versions of lament: "We did not know/ at the moment of parting/ that it was a moment of parting." Expanding an earlier rendition of Ali's works, the multinational translating team clearly transmits Ali's humor, his way with a tale and his deep roots in "fatigue, hunger, vagrancy,/ debts and addiction to ruin." Composed between the early 1970s and now, Ali's poems are timely and affecting; his 1984 masterpiece, "The Falcon," portrays the poet as a migratory bird indebted less to his companions than to his own "sadness... so much greater than I am." A moving, richly poetic story, in which all the deprivations of Ali's verse coalesce in a child's desire for a pair of shoes, closes the collection. (Oct.)