Khumásiyát: Poems from the Moroccan Desert by Yahya Frederickson

Enter this charmed space and find a world of fundamental things: tents, beads, saffron, copper, cockroaches, goats, meat, pigeons, the stuff of life in the desert. It is a small, austere list, a spare vocabulary, but the space it opens up is vast.

The title Khumásiyát has its own vastness, delivering more information than we may see at first. Omar Khayyam’s poems were rubá‘iyát, quatrains, startling little statements in four lines, named from the same Arabic stem as rub‘, “divided into four parts” (arba‘ = “four”). Khumásiyát is the same linguistic pattern applied to the Arabic stem for “five” (khums = “divided into five parts”; khamsa = “five”). Division by five provides the ribs that hold the book together: five nouns to a line, five words spaced out on a five-part grid (like an overture to the music which follows), sometimes images and sounds set free in fives across the page, or laid out with one familiar object on the left plus a four-part fantasy definition on the right. Five-ness offers a self-imposed set of rules in which some readers may see the mystique of the OULIPO writers (Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec) and some may see a cunning do-it-yourself travel book. Khumásiyát creates a complete, full world carried lightly by a poet who has been there.

–Michael Beard, series co-editor, “Middle Eastern Literature in Translation,” Syracuse University Press

Saffron donkey dagger // a moon in the throat // a bag of prayers // seven palms during the liver moon…Yahya Frederickson’s Khumásiyát, like the eastern edge of Morocco, appears at first to be an entry point to a singular place, the Sahara, with its opening “list” of elemental vocabulary drawn from the landscape and its inhabitants, words that appear and reappear in the poems. Page after page reveals a percussive rhythm that both summons and is summoned from sand and sky, rock and riddle, with a tempo that changes in the elusive manner of the elements until even time and distance lose their certainties. Frederickson’s work arrives at a crescendo where land is obscured from sky, wind speaks to the moon, and omens are seen in the sediments, and we are returned to the world with a sense we have been taken to the very edge of awe.

–Heather Altfeld, author of Post-Mortem