Praise
Each poem testifies to Laâbi's revolt against silencing, oppression, and exclusion, promoting an alternative world based on resistance, love, and commitment...Laâbi reaffirms the ability of poetry to transcend borders, celebrate human desires, and denounce atrocities and horror, from Madrid to Baghdad.
The great power and subtlety of the work lies in the fine balance it strikes between that Peter Pan–like sensitivity, vulnerability and imagination, and the brutality of the real world, history and politics.
Keeping pace with the long poems that are Abdellatif Laâbi's distinctive achievement – the poems of torture and imprisonment in Morocco, or 'People of Madrid, Pardon' written in response to the train bombings of 2004 – an English-speaking reader like me inevitably keeps waiting for the public voice, the high style of anger and compassion, to falter or overreach. But Laâbi's voice does neither. Donald Nicholson-Smith's translations hold fast to this poetry's unnerving eloquence and simplicity, and its hell-for-leather speed.
As the new collection In Praise of Defeat, deftly translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, shows, Laâbi’s early poems are poems of protest and of incarceration. They powerfully evoke the need for poetry to bear witness...In Praise of Defeat presents a poet-activist who was born in the direst possible circumstances, survived them, and has continued on a trajectory of art and activism. He shows any poet how the artistic space created by “poet, activist, former prisoner, exile” is the space where the most crucial acts of art happen.
Laâbi's poetic voice consistently raises a song of possibilities above the dirge of cruelty.
Laâbi has always been interested in inviting his readers to imagine what it would look like for a society to publicly honor, rather than privately imprison, the poets responsible for unmaking its own language.
Abdellatif Laâbi’s rhythm and flow come through in these incantatory verses of struggle and love for a reimagined land. He may be heeded or ignored, but the prophet-poet has spoken.
As In Praise of Defeat shows, Laâbi’s early poems are poems of protest and of incarceration. They powerfully evoke the need for poetry to bear witness.
Extras
This profile at The Majalla focuses on the political resistance of Abdellatif Laâbi’s poetry.
Read an interview with Abdellatif Laâbi in the Quarterly Conversation.
In this interview with Kristen Privallet, featured on double change, the author discusses poetry and language.
Read two poems from In Praise of Defeat over at BOMB.
Listen to Donald Nicholson-Smith speak about Laâbi and read from In Praise of Defeat here.
Lebanese-American writer Kaelen Wilson-Goldie mentions In Praise of Defeat in her 2016 roundup for Frieze.
In this interview with the Griffin Poetry Prize Finalists, Donald Nicholson-Smith discusses the endurance of poetry.
Shortlisted for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
