Short poetic conversations with God, where the Ineffable is found in ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. The subjects range from playfulness, death, sex, children, all consuming burning love, AIDS, starvation to meditations on Time and True Love.
In her highly ambitious second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg takes her inspiration from the alphabet. A meditation on the hump of a camel, and what it hides. A reminder that tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, and a vision of the plant as Adam’s downfall. The Book of Kells, gold-leafed and extravagantly decorated by monks. Titled for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, these poems are richly grounded in objects both humble and exotic. Vandenberg explores the intersection of power and forgiveness, and deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in emotionally poignant ways. “What will protect us?” one poem asks. “The words will be our weapons. In the end.” Moving between the physical and the abstract, the individual and the collective, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World unearths meaning—with astonishing beauty—from the pain of loss and separation.
The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals ranges across time and place in visiting personal as well as historical and even imagined experience. As an abecedarian was once used to teach the basics of a thing—say, to recognize an alphabet—Gibson, who has labelled his collection a “scrambled abecedarian,” suggests that all meaning arises out of disorder. However, it is from this disorder that the varied subjects of the poems, controlled by a single form comprising the collection, are shaped into a significance, whether that significance is to record a life at its start, or at its conclusion. Degas In Degas’ The Absinthe Drinker, the woman in the bar looks so alone and depressed as she stares at her drink. Earlier, she was imagining she would meet someone as she was getting dressed; now, she stares at her drink. There are drunks all around. Everyone drinks absinthe. Lower-class women love it best. They stare at the drink (it’s a poison, literally; they could care less), as they pour it over sugar to cut its bitterness. They stare and drink. Degas said he viewed women as if through a bathroom keyhole: she gazes into her crystal ball’s green mist—stares, drinks.
A star-studded anthology infuses English poetry with the rigor and wit of a foreign form. In recent years, the ghazal (pronounced "ghuzzle"), a traditional Arabic form of poetry, has become popular among contemporary English language poets. But like the haiku before it, the ghazal has been widely misunderstood and thus most English ghazals have been far from the mark in both letter and spirit. This anthology brings together ghazals by a rich gathering of 107 poets including Diane Ackerman, John Hollander, W. S. Merwin, William Matthews, Paul Muldoon, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and many others. As this dazzling collection shows, the intricate and self-reflexive ghazal brings the writer a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Agha Shahid Ali's lively introduction gives a brief history of the ghazal and instructions on how to compose one in English. An elegant afterword by Sarah Suleri Goodyear elucidates the larger issues of cultural translation and authenticity inherent in writing in a "borrowed" form.
This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Codes, Cryptology and Information Security, C2SI 2019, held in Rabat, Morocco, in April 2019. The 19 regular papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The first aim of this conference is to pay homage to Said El Hajji for his valuable contribution in research, teaching and disseminating knowledge in numerical analysis, modeling and information security in Morocco, Africa, and worldwide. The second aim of the conference is to provide an international forum for researchers from academia and practitioners from industry from all over the world for discussion of all forms of cryptology, coding theory, and information security.