A new perfume in a book… A reading of the collection (Love Has Another Smell) by the poet: Ali Murad

Avin Alo

(Love has another smell) is the title of a collection of poetry by the poet Ali Murad, which was issued in Egypt by the Belomania Publishing and Distribution House, with a cover design by Doaa Bateekh. The collection came in (106) pages of middle sections, and (53) texts between long, short, and flash.

It carried titles such as: (Tissues of Boredom, The Rain is God’s Tears, A God Speaks of His Wounds, Blood Dripping from the Blackboard, I Search in My Blood for Someone Else,…)
Before this poetry collection, the poet had published two poetry collections:
(Water refraction in glass memory, and Matryoshka.)
The poet Ali Murad begins his collection with:
I have enough aloe vera blossom
To darn the garment of the letter
To prolong the life of the poem
And I am nothing but your shadow..

It seems clear to the reader that the poet tried to build another world with poetry, with imagination and wishes, with extremely precise details and images, and he knows how to take the recipient to somewhat strange places, which he built in his fertile imagination and painted as he wished, to present to his reader the creativity of a poet who surrendered to the poem until it obeyed him in writing it. It builds real worlds, real-time, present and distant at the same time, and draws a path of images and scenes that are almost rare in the reader’s memory:
And because you are my ego..and my everything
Because you are bigger than the map
And more sincere than wailing
I baptize you with ink and bury you in me…

In many of the pages of the collection, the reader inhales the perfume of a woman or many women. They push the poet to write about the biography of his heart and their hearts, about hope and love, about deferred desires and dreams that come true and others die, about their things with which they adorn their beauty, their sadness and their happiness. He cries sometimes near and sometimes far away. They are his memories, his letters, his nostalgia, and his love.

Collect your sweet memories in an easy package
Bury her next to you.
Your many names
Your 3D earrings
Your sexy laugh
And your cute, naive nature.

Ali’s language is the language of a professional and daring poet, master of the tools with which he builds poetic images and his own poetic world. He knows the truths of poetry and the corridors of its beautiful world, and its many letters in various fields of feeling. He knows how to unleash his imagination far away, and knows how to bring it back into his hands. It was as if he was at the window of his room or knocking on the door, to create new images that he discovered deep there, there where he was, so that this somewhat strange imagination would appear, in the form of a flash or light magic between the pages of the collection:
Every woman falls asleep to your voice
She wakes up from her sleep
feeling happy
Then it bites your heart out.

Stark worlds full of anxiety, as if he was fighting wars, and shadows of his blood flowed from between the pages, flowing with gunpowder and the perfumes of warriors.

I am the only survivor of the massacre
I am half dead, returning from the fields of blood
From the investigators’ difficult question
What is your name)
I am the martyr hanging at the entrance to the market
Passers-by don’t see it.
I am a water gun and simple games
And I am the one whom God expelled from your heart
And from the cemetery on Wednesday.

In more than one place, the poet mentions the word “ink,” this fragrant ink with which he wrote his poetry collection:
(Color… ink only)
(There is a girl riding a horse made of ink)
(It is nice that the ink is your eternal bleeding)
As if he was saying the ink is my blood.

The image is precise, dense, and inspired by a pure Kurdish environment, which the reader senses through the past, places, memories, and names:
I, the wretched Amudi, set fire to the barley threshing floor
And steal Anatolian pasteq..
I am a horse groaning under the weight of blond tobacco
And from the gums of the trains, I extract the teeth of the station
Lest you be afraid of chickens (khajiya)
When military vehicles pass by
I am a shepherd of the lights (of perfectionism)
And my sheep graze in the vineyard (Malla Hassan)
And bathe in Hamdouna water.
I am the Aryan…the Omri who never sleeps.

It seems that this poet, who is in love with all the details of his city and the details of his heart and soul, which prostrated so much in the niche of nostalgia and hope, and over the years, searches for the shadows of the absent and present to be his refuge in the time of absence, as if the borders of his homeland were the borders of his soul and the borders of grandmothers’ stories about heroes who passed away crying, and before a second sun rises, unlike the one to which the poet ran before sunset, carrying his poems and tears in a small bag on his shoulders, a bag that resembles another scent of love.