Desert Songs: Poetry by Yahia Lababidi

Lababidi seems to have something other, and otherworldly, in mind. The poet crafts a mythic Egypt... a land abundant with connotation, fertile with image and nuance. Its mountains are an "imperishable memory of the desert/craniums exposed, crumbling horribly" and a "school of inscrutable sphinxes/master storytellers sworn to secrecy." The desert "is a cemetery/picking its teeth with bones."

Words are an imperfect tool with which the poet tries to reflect a spirit that is the poem's true subject... Perhaps he will approach more closely the unreachable goal of mining the spirit that, in his view, masses beneath the surface of what a poet can directly observe or his words precisely describe.

?Patrick Meighan, author, editor and professor.

A...