Synopsis
Inspired by the discovery of an ancient tombstone found near Hadrian's Wall in Britannia, a single line that ignited the poet's imagination, "The Stone Serpent: Barates's Elegy to His Beloved Regina" weaves together themes of love, exile, freedom, and memory in a work that fuses epic, historical, and mythological elements and succeeds in stirring the contemporary reader. It is a message in a bottle cast into the sea of history that Al-Jarrah delivers back to today's world, a message of encounter between East and West, of peace, of the possibility of coexistence. With a sublime language whose poetry explodes in every word, the author celebrates the triumph of love, the highest human sentiment, which transcends borders, ethnic differences, and distances to survive time and space, and confirms himself as one of the most profound and original voices in contemporary Arabic literature.
