You and Yours

I met NSN through Bill Moyer's The Language of Life series and have been a fan ever since. She is a poetry superstar, but she's not the sort of poetry superstar you'd put on a pedastal. She's the kind you'd invite into you kitchen to talk about current events on a truly fundamental, human level -- over a cup of Turkish coffee. As a poet, I truly appreciate the fact that so much of her poetry is about words, the power of simple words, the systematic public abuse of common words. As a Lebanese American, NSN helps me to look on the Middle East at one remove, like her, and with compassion. Her poetry shows why, if we have only one thing clutched in our hands at the very end of everything, it should be our basic humanity. Now, wouldn't you want someone like that to talk to in your kitchen over coffee? In a conversation that would be all poetry, no less?

"What countries may we/ sing into?/ What lines should we all/ be crossing?" Naomi Shihab Nye writes poems of grace and humor and wit and tension and ache and remembrance and longing - and of everyday life. Such a sweep of huge ideas comes from her intelligent pen! Living in San Antonio, Texas with her child encourages her to observe the fundamentals of living, of loving, of finding the beauty/spiritual in all things. These poems of Part One of this extraordinary collection are about living. Part Two contains the poetry that speaks most clearly to this reader. While she is always competent to address the darker side of all things in her poems of Part One, in this second body of work she turns her vigilant eye to the horrors of war, giving words to the overwhelming facts of tragedy, death, inequity, and all the unimaginables that escort war in the Middle East - no, in all wars. "There is no 'stray' bullet, sirs./ No bullet like a worried cat/ crouching under a bush,/ no half-hairless puppy bullet/ dodging midnight streets. The bullet could not be a pecan/ plunking the tin roof,/ not hardly, no fluff of pollen/ on October's breath, no humble pebble at our feet....So don't gentle it, please....This bullet had no secret happy hopes,/ it was not singing to itself with eyes closed/ under the bridge." Perhaps it is her Palestinian-American heritage that makes her insight into the ongoing elegy for the Middle East so poignant, or perhaps it is simply that she is a very fine poet, a seer able to paste together the minutiae of living each day with the epoch of facing war head on. She has the gift and we are the better for it. Grady Harp, September 05