أربع قصائد

Jan Dammu’s poetry represents the absurdist and surreal philosophy he espoused. His metaphors, insights, and aphorisms allow a glimpse into a mind that was both disconnected from and aware of reality, especially some of its darker aspects. His poems eschew any kind of traditional Arabic poetic lyricism; instead they reflect the use of poetic techniques such as defamiliarization, collage, and fragmentation, derived from the influence of surrealism and Dadaism in modernist European poetry, especially their emphasis on strange juxtapositions of words to evoke sensations outside of their conventional representations.

Among the poems selected here, “Schubert the Greek” incorporates a degree of intertextuality that requires a certain knowledge of western classical music and Greek mythology on the part of the reader. Like almost all his poetry, fragmentation is a prominent feature of this poem; this places him alongside modernists who tend to prefer fragmentation and collage to a cohesive “narrative.” His was a metaphysical stance against the ugliness and fakery of the world, and this sense of futility led him to experience a string of disappointments. This manifests itself in the two images of the axe and the world in “The Shade.” According to the Iraqi critic Muḥammad Maẓlūm, the poem “Wilds of the Metropolis” is closest to depicting Dammu’s own life and has a confessional tone of self-chastisement. The contemporary city as a “wild land” is likened to the never-ending desert that stretches to infinity.

Throughout his alienated life and the crises he experienced, he was aware of the difference between the world around him and his own private world. For someone who dreamed, wrote, and analyzed poetry for more than forty years, his output is acknowledged to be quite meager, and many of his poems have been lost in the general chaos of his life.