Belinda's Review of Because of You – Selected Poems by Bilal Al Masri

 

Review: Because of You – Selected Poems by Bilal Al Masri

Translated from Arabic by Dr Anba Jawi MBE and Dr Mohamad Haj Mohamad | Palewell Press, 2024

Bilal Al Masri writes from a country where, as Dr Anba Jawi puts it in her introduction, "human life has no value, and killing is ordinary." Yet Because of You is not a collection defined by despair. It is something stranger and more alive than that — a book perpetually caught between opposites, where tenderness and violence, presence and erasure, the sacred and the nihilistic collide on the same breath.

Al Masri writes out of Lebanon, out of war, out of a reality where beauty and brutality are not opposites but constant companions. What is extraordinary is how this context produces not bitterness but a ferocious, almost mystical aliveness on the page. These poems pulse. They contradict themselves deliberately and brilliantly, stretching language to hold experiences that resist easy expression. "I carry my head with cut off hands" is not merely a striking image — it is an entire worldview compressed into eight words.

The collection moves with remarkable range. The shorter poems are like perfectly cut stones. Absence, Exercise, The Path, Whiteness — each arrives swiftly and leaves a lasting mark. My Mother is one of the most beautiful poems about maternal love you are likely to read anywhere, in any language, casting silence itself as ocean and shelter. The longer, more ambitious pieces — Jasmine rises like bullets, And because of you…, Until you have become a garden — reveal a poet equally at home in expansive, accumulating structures, where meaning builds through repetition and paradox rather than linear argument.

Throughout, Al Masri's use of oxymoron feels not like a literary device but like a genuine mode of perception — the only honest way to describe a world in which jasmine and bullets occupy the same air. He touches Sufism and nihilism almost simultaneously, as Dr Jawi notes in her illuminating introduction, and the tension between transcendence and nothingness gives the whole collection a spiritual electricity that is rare and thrilling.

The translation is a triumph. Dr Anba Jawi and Dr Mohamad Haj Mohamad have preserved the strangeness of these poems rather than domesticating them, which is exactly the right choice. The English sings. It takes real courage and craft to trust a reader with lines this unusual, and the translators have trusted us fully. Dr Jawi's candid introduction about the collaborative process of translation is itself a pleasure to read, offering genuine insight into the difficulties and rewards of carrying poetry across languages.

Because of You is the kind of collection that makes you grateful for the existence of literary translation — the reminder that extraordinary voices are speaking all around the world, waiting only for the bridge of language to reach us. Bilal Al Masri is such a voice.