Dayplaces

Poetry. The New World Translation Series Number 5. Translated by Jon Davis and Christopher Merrill. "The Iraq that appears in DAYPLACES is a literary construct as well as a political and historical fact. It is as if Naseer Hassan has recreated Iraq--at least partly through the lens of Dante's Divine Comedy--and turned it into a world that we can see both as itself and as a world reimagined for its literary possibilities. The genius of Naseer Hassan's book is the way he presents Iraq's chaos as analogous to the world's, the way he equates Iraqis' condition to the human condition. 'The agony here,' he has written, 'is the world's agony, which can mean everything's agony, my agony, the nation's agony, the agony of human life, and so on, but of course this is one side of the world, the other side is its beauty.'"--from the tranlator's preface by Jon Davis




"Naseer Hassan leaves us in an exchange of silences, an exchange of lightness and darkness. Leaves us with the morsels of buildings, cities, civilization, souls, corpses, spirits after an exploration: ancestors are like 'dust accumulated on the table,' the voice of childhood is 'a remote encounter,' and 'the bookshops carry the papers of those who came to the riverbank -- like corpses or books' to 'the house of evening that roads left behind.'...DAYPLACES is a structure built of minute and massive infinities that sap war of its darkplaces. When you have finished reading, 'the land' is no longer 'absent.'"--from the introduction by Nathalie Handal