Salah Faik: Selected Poems - Tapa blanda

This book is a selection of 190 poems written in Arabic by the Iraqi poet Salah Faik, and translated from Arabic into English by Haider Al-Kabi . Salah lives in a world and creates another one next to it. His created world is full of actual and metaphoric animals. They share his exile. Few poets in the world are as exciting as Salah, do yourself a favor and read his work. It is gorgeous.

Salah Faik was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1945. In 1963, after the bloody February Coup, he joined the Kurd revolution. Besides his regular job as a journalist and translator, he worked for a railway company. In 1974 he fled Iraq to Syria with the help of renowned Iraqi poet Abdul Wahab al-Bayati. In 1976 he emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he was friends with many British poets and painters. In 1993, he decided to move to the Philippines, where he lives ever since. His published work includes Hostages (Damascus 1975), That Country (London 1978), The Path to the Sea (Paris 1983), Interludes and Dreams (London 1984), Exodus (London 1987), Years (Cologne, Germany 1993) and Bears at a Funeral Ceremony (Baghdad & Beirut 2013). It is worth mentioning that two of his publications, Another Fire Befitting a City (1979) and The Lode, the Word (1985), were published but with a different spelling of his last name Salah Faiq. His work has been translated into English, French, Persian, and Kurdish.