Review of the poetry collection “Rain of the Sea” By Khalid Albudoor By Mohammed Ali Shams Al Deen

Review of the poetry collection “Rain of the Sea” By Khalid Albudoor 

By Mohammed Ali Shams Al Deen 

Al Hayat Newspaper 

9 April 2009 

With the era of post- modernism, most poets often search for poetry in remote places, in symbols, metaphors, and masks. They chose ambiguous, mysterious and difficult roads, and in the darkness of symbols the poets move, and the poem's destiny became to be born from the womb of the mysterious and the unknown. It looks as if the mysterious had become a value. The late Francophone Egyptian novelist and poet Albert Kossery said: “The West today respects only the mysterious.” But the creative encounter may be in another place that is closer, within reach of the hand or the eye, obscured from the seer by a transparent curtain, it is sufficient for the poet to remove it with a touch, or to tear his veil with a look. 

This idea came to me when I was reading the last collection of poems by the Emirati poet Khalid Albudoor entitled “Rain on the Sea” (2009). It is a poetic work that, starting from its direct, sensual, scenery title, “Rain on the Sea” until the last poem in it, entitled “Four Birds and a Chair,” raises the question: Where does poetry resides? And how does the poet make his unique poetic objects, out of the prose of existence and the ordinary things of life. And do the details that every person lives on earth, and the scenes surrounding humans in general, have secrets and characteristics that only the poet sees and touches? The title “Rain on the Sea,” for example, is a neutral title, so how can his poems become poetry? Likewise, the title “Four Birds and a Chair” is a visual title, so how did the poem become poetry? In What way? 

It is the core question in this collection of poems of Khalid Albudoor. This collection takes the title “The Sea,” but the poems about the sea written by the poet are not like the sea poems written by Saint -John Perse “Beacons” or “A Mers.” An unparalleled back and forth, interrogating the waves, rocks, and sea whirlwinds, as well as the depths, through a linguistic stream and a symbolic storm. 

Turning with a little metaphor, quiet contemplation, touching the waves, horizon, wind, and sand with his fingers or with eye lashes, he proceeds in his poetic boat, as if he flips through the album of his daily life and contemplates its images preserved in his mind. As if he sits on a chair between two lovers, or to witness a word of love, or put a hand on a hand, or a hug of a lover.  

 

He touches with his poetry everything, even the secret of being. 

“Above the horizon of the sea / A sun that will soon disappear / Above the clouds / The sun will return to us / It will return / Because it never went away” (From the poem “She Will Return). 

When he throws his body into the sea or into the sand, or looks at the distant horizon, he rarely dreams, rather he looks as if he is dreaming. The few touches he gives to the scenes formed through sentences and words, are not overwhelming and do not break with their origin or nature. But it is definitely not nature itself. The little modification that the poet makes on her, with a blow from here, and a blow from there, is enough to get it out of its neutrality in nature, and bring it into its bias towards the paradox of poetry, and what goes on in Khalid Albudoor’s poetic world is a few things, scenes and details, all dipped in sea water, that is, the water of poetry, and praised with love, as there are always two things in his poems, he and she. And when he combines these poems into “Nujoom...” “where life is accompanied by an unparalleled sailing,” poetry become a boat sailing in a beautiful, private and intimate sea, as if poetry and the sea exist together for “her companionship ...” Whether digging in the sand, burying his dreams, or experiencing winter mornings, or contemplating the shallow green water and sand under the water, or contemplating the blue dawn, and the high tide where the moon is full, the sea and sea birds, and inhaled the scent of coral, and whether the sea was ancient with sailors and sailing ships, or The sea was new and buried, and whether he spoke of the echoes of the drums of Africa and the seamen sailing with carnations and timber, or of the fishermen who: “When the lightning split the sea/They had returned/Then they surrendered their catch/Before the rain” (from the poem 

“They Went” 

Whether he warms up “on the outskirts of the islands/listening to the songs of the primitives reaching him from the depths of the caves” (from the poem “With Sacred Fire”), or contemplating the rain as it fell profusely on the shores, he remains, with a little metaphor, the marine boy who surrenders to the alertness of his senses and the alertness of his memory, on The shining of beacons that “will soon fade behind the waves” (from the poem “Till sunset”) and the narrator who counts his days, sees or remembers them, are the same, and contemplates the sea and the lightning that shines on its waves, then, with one poetic stroke, merges things and worlds By the sea, and by the sea with a woman : He says in the poem “Initiation” in the section called “About her sea and the lightning she leaves above the desert of my dreams”: “Once you stood and the sea greeted you / The horizon was lying / Like a warm line on the chest of the world / You became in the sea / The sea became in you ”. 

It is these light poetic strokes that revive the poetic description 

and narration in Khalid Albudoor's poems. In his poetic way, 

he is closer to Yannis Ritsos than to any other poet. 

He goes on describing or contemplating a picture or 

remembering a biography or a scene. You almost feel 

that he will not come up with anything more than 

description, or what conveys the scene. From his narrative 

position to his poetic position, then suddenly, and with 

a certain touch, with a sign, assuming, the light is illuminated. 

The poetry emerges from the scatter things of life, 

as a spring of water springs from a rock.