Samir Darwish Livres

A book of poetry about exile and home, love and loss, describing the experience of Islam in Europe.

This book contains a very personal experience through which the poet dives into his self, as he considers poetry a revelation of the hidden self, its pains and aspirations. He tries to be realistic to a wounding extent, or makes his reader believe that; hence he erases the distance between poetry and reality in a way that enables his reader to draw a portrait of his face without seeing him, for he does not only describe his inner emotions and apprehensions, but records the sounds of nature surrounding him in his isolation, which he chose willingly as a humane and an intellectual stance. The poems of Samir Darwish are paintings and still scenes; he halts the scene and dives into it to see himself clearer, to see the universe through moments that might appear ordinary, and habitual, from the outside at least. His poems are also very condensed, as he uses the less number of words possible to build an artistic body, benefiting from the published modern global poetry and from the new movement of the Arab poetry.

On 15 April 1989, during the opening minutes of the FA Cup semi-final between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool, 96 men, women and children died in what remains the most serious tragedy in UK sporting history - the Hillsborough Stadium disaster. Thousands more suffered physical injury and long-term psychological harm. For almost thirty years the survivors and the families of the dead had to campaign against the police, government and media who blamed the supporters for the tragedy. Eventually, in 2016 a second inquest ruled that the supporters were unlawfully killed due to failures of the police and ambulance services. InJune2017,sixpeoplewerecharged with manslaughter by gross negligence, misconduct in public office and perverting the course of justice. Published to mark the 30th anniversary of the disaster,Truth Street combines the eye-witness testimonies of the survivors at the second inquest to create an epic-poem that is part oral history and part documentary theatre. Inspired by the work of Charles Reznikoff and Svetlana Alexietich, Truth Street was first performed in 2017 at the Utter Lutonia festival and the Brighton Festival.