Knife Sharpener: Selected Poems

"Sargon seemed to feel also the even greater, historical weight of conflicts, tensions, misunderstandings and oppressions of the spirit, as if his poems came through his own time and language but from somewhere else." - Pat Boran

Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944-2007) remains one of the Arab world's best-known and influential of contemporary poets. Born into an Iraqi Assyrian family and growing up in Al-Habbaniyah, Kirkuk and Baghdad, he started publishing his own work in 1961, in the ground-breaking Shi'r [Poetry] magazine in Beirut. After settling in San Francisco in the late 1960s, he became an unstoppable translator of most of the major English-language modern poets into Arabic and many others, and dedicated his life to reading, writing and translating poetry, every so often making forays to Europe to meet up with fellow exiles and perform at festivals. He died in Berlin, October 2007.

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