Journeys in the Levant. "How to speak of the imaginative reach of a
land habitually seen as a seedbed of faiths and heresies,
confluences and ruptures...trouble spot and findspot, ruin and
renewal, fault line and ragged clime, with a medley of people and
languages once known with mingled affection and wariness as
Levantine?" So begins poet Gabriel Levin in his journeys in the
Levant, the exotic land that stands at the crossroads of western
Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and northeast Africa. Part
travelogue, part field guide, and part literary appreciation, "The
Dune's Twisted Edge" assembles six interlinked essays that explore
the seaboard of the Levant and its deserts, bringing to life this
enigmatic part of the world. Striking out from his home in
Jerusalem in search of a poetics of the Fertile Crescent, Levin
probes the real and imaginative terrain of the Levant, a place that
beckoned to him as a source of wonder and self-renewal. His
footloose travels take him to the Jordan Valley; to Wadi Rumm south
of Petra; to the semiarid Negev of modern-day Israel and its
Bedouin villages; and, in his recounting of the origins of Arabic
poetry, to the Empty Quarter of Arabia where the pre-Islamic poets
once roamed. His meanderings lead to encounters with a host of
literary presences: the wandering poet-prince Imru al-Qays,
Byzantine empress Eudocia, British naturalist Henry Baker Tristram,
Herman Melville making his way to the Dead Sea, and even New York
avantgarde poet Frank O'Hara. When he is not confronting ghosts,
Levin finds himself stumbling upon the traces of vanished
civilizations. He discovers a ruined Umayyad palace on the
outskirts of Jericho, the Greco-Roman hot springs near the Sea of
Galilee, and Nabatean stick figures carved on stones in the sands
of Jordan. Vividly evoking the landscape, cultures, and poetry of
this ancient region, "The Dune's Twisted Edge" celebrates the
contested ground of the Middle East as a place of compound myths
and identities.
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