Heavenly Life: Selected Poems - Softcover

With this collection Anglophone readers are introduced to a poet of global scope. Ramsey Nasr is already a polyvalent literary figure in his own country and language multifaceted, virtuosic, irreverent and polymath.

His poems, in every form and register from sonnet to Whitmanian tirade, do not balk at history, whether that of his family s situation in the West Bank or the fate of Dutch Jewish musicians and Mahler s music during the Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands to name but two stopping points. --Marilyn Hacker

?Prize-winning poet, essayist, dramatist and actor Ramsey Nasr, born 1974 in Rotterdam into a Palestinian-Dutch family, was voted Poet Laureate of the Netherlands in 2009. He selected the poems in Heavenly Life from his collections and works written as poet laureate. His award-winning translator, David Colmer, has dynamically recreated in English the patterns and sounds of Ramsey's inventive, bold and thoughtful poems. The collection includes a three-part poem inspired by the life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and the title poem written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of composter Gustav Mahlers birth, and the poem that voted Nasr into his laureate post.