From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
Reaching Out
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
Boxed-Up Words
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
Setting Sail
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
Outline of a Woman
A Woman on a Rug
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
In the Caravansaray
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World, another two-page spread.
A King and a Ghost
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
Crossing Pages
A two-page spread from Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
A Wall of Words
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
A Wave of Words
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
Planting Words
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
The Country and the City
Building on Words
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
A Woman in Words, or a Hillock?
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
Inside the Seven Gates
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
Entering the Seven Gates
From Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World
Today, we are back to ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī, and we will stay with this collection for a while. Although the UCLA library removed the cover of this collection when processing it for shelving, the book itself is full of terrific images like this one, combining calligraphy with figural representations.
The artist, who both designed the missing cover and drew the inside illustrations, is Hāshim Samarjī.
This edition is from the Dār al-Ṭūnisiyyah li-l-Nashr, 1972.
The Blind Antichrist and the Strangers
Let's take a day's break from images in al-Bayātī's collections and admire this wonderful cover from Shādhil Ṭāqah's 1969 al-Aʿwar al-dajjāl wa-l-ghurabāʾ (Bayrūt: Dār Maktabat al-Ḥayāh). Cheers to Shādhil Ṭāqah, a forgotten pioneer of modernist poetry in Iraq; jeers to the University of Toronto Library's bindery for taping over parts of the cover.
A Devil Flies Over the Countryside
From the first edition of The Eyes of Dead Dogs