Dubai (Union)
A few days ago, in the French capital, Paris, the new collection of poetry by Emirati poet Adel Khouzam, titled “Poems in the Palm of the Hand”, was published by the prestigious French publishing house “Larmattan”, which owns ten bookstores in France alone, including six in the Fifth District. From the French capital, Paris, and Khuzam’s new collection constitutes a new and remarkable presence for Emirati literature on the international level.
New poetic energy
In introducing the book, the French House said on the back of the outer cover: “There is a new poetic energy that we discover in these texts by the Arab poet Adel Khouzam, who is skilled in generating images and merging meanings and ideas, and broadcasting them on a different horizon that establishes the art of writing poems of the daily life of modern man, and raises his questions that It is formed by changing identities and overlapping cultural and aesthetic boundaries.
The book consists of regarding 230 short poems the size of the palm of the hand, and all the titles of the poems consist of only one word as establishing the rhythm of the book and the texts that Khouzam chose to publish first in “French”, if he had not previously published them in Arabic. While the texts were translated by the Lebanese writer residing in Paris, Hussein Qubeisi, who worked on translating many books into Arabic by major French writers, including Sylvia Neff, Claude Kahn, and Roger Garaudy. The book was also adorned with a large collection of interior drawings by the artist Manal Al-Khuzam, who also designed the cover painting, and had previously collaborated with the poet Adel Khouzam in designing the book “The Tree of the World Trees”, which was launched at “Expo 2020 Dubai”, with the participation of 406 international poets from the five continents. .
Adel Khozam’s experience is characterized by a rich poetic language, and his ability as a poet to diversify his writing styles between very long poems and short, intense texts. Over the past years, he was able to establish his name on the global level, by participating in publishing his texts in international multilingual literary periodicals, including «Chinese Italian, Spanish, English, Hindi and Macedonian”, and a complete collection of poetry was published in German, and his novel “Life with a Third Eye” was translated in the United States. He was also chosen as the coordinator of the World Poetry Movement in the UAE.
Khouzam belongs to the generation of poetic modernism in the UAE, which established his project in the renewal of poetry since the eighties, and has published regarding 18 books distributed among poetry, novels, philosophy, translations, and some studies. The Arab poet Adonis described his book “The Naked Spring” as the most insightful book among the Arabic poetry books of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Khouzam also won international prizes in poetry, including the “Tuliola” award in Italy, and the award for the best international poet of the year 2021 from the International Center for Translation and Poetry Research in China.
