Knife Sharpener — Selected Poems is a posthumous commemoration and celebration of Sargon Boulus, in a collection of poems, written between 1991 and 2007 that he translated himself, together with an essay, “Poetry and Memory”, written a few months before he died in October 2007.
With a Foreword by Adonis and an Introduction by Dublin poet and publisher Pat Boran, the volume includes nine pages of photographs and tributes from fellow poets and writers Saadi Youssef, Ounsi El-Hage, Amjad Nasser, Abbas Beydhoun, Abdo Wazen, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Kadhim Jihad Hassan, Khalid al-Maaly, and Elias Khoury, assembled and translated by fellow Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon, who described his death as leaving “a gaping wound in the heart of modern Arabic poetry”.
“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
Sargon Boulus was unusually influential among young Arab poets, who “found in him the father who refused to practise his patriarchy and a poet who always renewed himself in his rebellion against rhetoric . . ." Abdo Wazen
