Description

Mbarek Sryfi

Chasing a Moving Landscape

ISBN: 978-1-956921-03-8 (pbk., 104 pp.)

(May 1, 2022)

Spiritually bonded to the great masters—Basho, Whitman, and Wordsworth— Sryfi is a compassionate traveler of the human landscape, a poet who has listened for a long time to our anguish and the echoes of our solitude. The poems in Chasing a Moving Landscape narrate and probe our times, and in doing so they enlighten and offer much needed solace.

—Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas

As he chases a moving landscape in language, Mbarek Sryfi writes powerfully in praise of in-betweeness. Streets are adorned with broken promises, houses no longer seem like houses, wooden tables scarred with coffee rings, and the writing here is a requiem heard from old places while vinyl records are turning and all the while one’s English is tongue-tied and the experience of it—inside or out—is that of disquiet. We want to know where “all this pain” could be hidden. Nevertheless, the poems themselves are “left to tell the story.”

—Al Filreis, author of 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern

Gentle, reflective, hermetic, personal yet generous, Mbarek Sryfi lives in nature and nature reveals his intention. These poems are tectonic and organic interludes, insightful moments of solitude, elegiac and transient memories in town and country. Immersed in vivid drifts of experience, a sacramental poetry of murmurations, Chasing a Moving Landscape is a precise and fluid collection of poems rich with quiet tension and subtle strength, comforting and contemplative admissions of a sensual world. These are poems you cannot turn away from.  Someone has been here, and the poet has offered you his heart. 

—Michael Rothenberg, author of In Memory of a Banyan Tree