8vo. 135 pp., [3], Arabic text, modern hard back binding, original wrappers preserved, slightly foxed, otherwise copy in very good condition, Maktabat al-Kamal, Beirut, no date, ca. 1960.

Synopsis

Eliya Abu Madi (1890 – 1957) was a Lebanese poet, born in the village of Al-Muhaydithah, Mount Lebanon. At the age of 11 he moved to Alexandria, Egypt where he worked with his uncle. In 1911, he published his first collection of poems, Tazkar al-Madi.Shortly after, he was exiled by the Ottoman Turkish authorities, when he left Egypt for the United States and settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1916 he moved to New York City and began a career in journalism. In New York, Abu Madi met and worked with a number of Arab-American poets including Kahlil Gibran. He married the daughter of Najeeb Diab, editor of the Arabic language magazine Mera’a al-Gharb (Mirror of the West), and became the chief editor of that publication in 1918. His second poetry collection, Diwan Iliya Abu Madi, was published in New York in 1919; his third and most important collection, Al-Jadawil (The Streams), appeared in 1927. In 1929 Abu Madi founded his own periodical, Al-Samir, in Brooklyn. It began as a monthly, but after a few years it was published five times a week. His poems are very well known among Arabs; poet, author, and journalist Gregory Orfalea wrote that “his poetry is as commonplace and memorized in the Arab world as that of Robert Frost is in ours.”