No War in Troy

Synopsis

A new poetry collection by the Syrian poet Nouri al-Jarrah, titled "No War in Troy." In this work, according to the publisher, the poem for Nouri al-Jarrah no longer confines itself to evoking the magical atmosphere of Damascus's old quarters, its narrow, shaded alleyways on the edges of the Temple of Jupiter gate and al-Miskiyya, or the arch of Bab al-Shams on the city's eastern side, nor merely the towering childhood of the Muhajirin neighbourhood that descends toward the entire world, drawing the poet's words from his scattered notes across the wide earth. Now, from the vantage point of an ever-expanding collective exile, the poem awakens the monstrous figures that have descended upon the Syrian imagination, transforming the nightmarish reality into something else: an endless lyrical tragedy. The spirits, inhabitants, and creatures of the Syrian inferno in al-Jarrah's landscape in this poetry collection appear, this time, as though straining to carry a cosmic hymn toward a rising hoarseness, through deep calls arriving from a distant world. Calls that place the fragments of the image into their fitting spaces within an epic history that Homer, Dante, al-Ma'arri, and Lucian of Samosata never had the chance to record. A refined literary document of the bloody human moment, carved on ancient stone, destined for heirs not yet born. "No War in Troy." But it is a war in Damascus. Its voices and echoes reverberate through the chambers of a Mediterranean hymn, which the poet describes in a subtitle as "Homer's Last Words," and its tragic images pour forth from a mythological heritage, sending through the modern poet's voice sounds and spectres that cross through time to converge with daily realities that refuse to lay down their burden except in the fabric of the future.