Baboons of Hada
"The Baboons of Hada" introduces thirty years of Eric Ormsby's precise and generous poetry. Opening with an exuberant bestiary of spiders and starfish, penguins, snakes and contemplative baboons, the collection moves on to explore a world of intricate wonders and memories: the grandeur of noses, the mayonnaise tornado whipped up by a kitchen whisk, the gossip gravediggers whisper to the dead. An American childhood and kinships are evoked with loving particularity, alongside a flamboyant caliph, Lazarus and his disenchanted wife, and the great medieval Arab poet al-Mutanabbi writing in exile lines that reverberate across "all the empty places" of the world.
About the author
Eric Ormsby was born in Atlanta, Georgia. A distinguished scholar in the field of Islamic thought, he received a doctorate in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and taught at McGill University, Montreal for twenty years, where from 1996 he was Professor and Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies. In 2005 he moved to London where he took up a post as Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. In addition to his extensive writing on Classical Arabic literature and Islamic thought, and his translations from Arabic and Persian, he has published six poetry collections and is an essayist and reviewer and the author of two critical works on poetry and translation. His poems have appeared in such magazines as "The New Yorker", "The Paris Review" and "PN Review" and are included in "The Norton Anthology of Poetry".