I Know Well the Face of Despair

In poetry of rage and pain, Hatem Al-Shahri's despair is directed at Azrael, the angel of Death who splits the soul from the body. Misunderstood and alone, language is both the poet's saviour and his unforgiving nemesis. In his poems words become weapons, bullets and arrows intent on creating pain rather than beauty. An elegy and lament for language, this is poetry of isolation and despair. It is language itself that restricts the poet, shutting him out of a sense of joy or access to the sublime. And yet the poet finds an eerie strength, an accommodation and acceptance of mortality in his final bitter desire that language should live on, should be able to acquire a meaning of which he himself feels bereft.