Book description
The Baboons of Hada introduces thirty years of Eric Ormsby's
precise and generous poetry. Opening with an exuberant bestiary of
spiders and starfish, penguins, snakes and contemplative baboons, the
collection moves on to explore a world of intricate wonders and
memories: the grandeur of noses, the mayonnaise tornado whipped up by
a kitchen whisk, the gossip gravediggers whisper to the dead. An
American childhood and kinships are evoked with loving particularity,
alongside a flamboyant caliph, Lazarus and his disenchanted wife, and
the great medieval Arab poet al-Mutanabbi writing in exile lines that
reverberate across all the empty places' of the world.
'His poems afford the rare pleasure of listening to a polished yet
deeply humane sensibility respond, in language of exhilarating verve, to
whatever it seizes on or despairs of.' - The New Criterion Eric Ormsby
was born in Atlanta, Georgia. A distinguished scholar in the field of
Islamic thought, he received a doctorate in Near Eastern Studies from
Princeton University and taught at McGill University, Montreal for
twenty years, where from 1996 he was Professor and Director of the
Institute of Islamic Studies. In 2005 he moved to London where he took
up a post as Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Ismaili
Studies. In addition to his extensive writing on Classical Arabic
literature and Islamic thought, and his translations from Arabic and
Persian, he has published six poetry collections and is an essayist and
reviewer and the author of two critical works on poetry and translation.
His poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Paris
Review and PN Review and are included in The Norton Anthology of Poetry.
