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Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987-2008

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Flawed Landscape is a beautiful collection of poems that echo and resound with the loss of Palestine, the pleasures of survival and yearning; and the jaw-dropping ironies of a world in which too many of us spend more time wondering about "what to have for dinner" than trying to put an end to the atrocities of war and conquest.

These well-wrought lyrics sing the voice of a refugee who has managed to create a "folklore of each of the senses," but who will never fully recover from the original sin, the original song of rejection, the bittersweet gift of sadness--from a mother who "stuffed our thin bones with sentiments" and a father who had "a reservoir of tears."

The collection offers a new version of "The Little Prince" who cannot understand the logic of an air force bomber who is willing to kill innocent children in his hunt for the "monsters who hid in the building." From here Elmusa takes the reader on a haunting, resonant tour of the Palestinian tragedy, and beyond to a world in which the poet is always migratory, passing, travelling, yearning for a home. In many poems a home is found, in love, in marriage, in children, and in the revelations of the senses--the "olives and pears and figs and whatnot" of a continued life.

Despite the overarching tone of loneliness that links the three sections of the book, Flawed Landscape includes many poems that are whimsical in nature, underlining the poet's playful sense of humor. And yet the most powerful impression is that of loss. The reader is left with an image of the child in the refugee camp gazing up at the sky. "I had no ladder/and nothing from heaven fell/in my crescent hands."

A lot can change in a person over twenty one years. "Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987-2008" is award nominated poet Sharif S. Elmusa's solo anthology of poetry. Focusing on the themes of war, family, and exile, his work is powerful and moving, making "Flawed Landscape" a vivid portrait of a man's life through poetry. "The Two Angels": Among the things mother told me as a child://Every person has two angels//standing on his shoulders./And they weigh every deed./On the right, Nakir, /for the good deeds;/for the bad, Nakeer, on the left.//That is why my gait is tilted now/and as the years pass--/ my back will grow hunched.// Such nakedness!