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Front Cover
Back Cover
In Deadly Embrace: Arabic Hunting Poems
Authors:
Ibn al-Muʿtazz (author), James E. Montgomery (translator), A.E. Stallings (foreword), Richard Sieburth (editor)
Series:
Library of Arabic Literature
ISBN:
9789395474795
Binding:
Hardcover
Year:
2026
Pages:
152
Size:
15 x 23 x 2 cm
Weight:
338 grams
Price:
INR
995.00
About the Book
A collection of poems about nature and power.
To Ibn al-Muʿtazz and his Abbasid contemporaries, the hunt was more than a diversion—it was the theater for their poetic and political endeavors, captured here in fifty-nine Arabic hunting poems, or
ṭardiyyāt
. The poems of
In Deadly Embrace
describe hunting expeditions with animals trained to hunt, including saluki hounds and birds of prey. Many were composed after these outings, when the hunting party gathered to enjoy the game they caught.Poetry was central to Abbasid society and served as a method of maintaining networks of patronage and friendship; the poems in this collection reflect these power dynamics and allowed Ibn al-Muʿtazz—prince of the realm and in line for the caliphate—to explore his own relationship to social and political power and to demonstrate his fitness to rule.Ibn al-Muʿtazz was an influential poet and literary theorist of the Modernist school of poetry.
In Deadly Embrace
merges the Modernists’ new techniques and styles with age-old themes: military prowess and wisdom, fitness to rule and comradeship, the camaraderie of the hunt and the cult of heroic masculinity. Groundbreaking and evocative, the poems paint vivid pictures of hunting scenes while posing deep questions about our attentiveness to the natural world and the relationship of the human to the nonhuman.
About the Authors
Ibn al-Muʿtazz
Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 296/908) was an accomplished and prolific poet and author of works of literary theory and literary history. He was the direct descendant of six caliphs and was himself made caliph in 296/908, but ruled for only one day before he was killed by the palace guards, partisans of his brother al-Muqtadir.
James E. Montgomery
James E. Montgomery is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity Hall. His three most recent books of hunting poetry are
A Demon Spirit
,
In Deadly Embrace
, and
Fate the Hunter
. In 2024 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.
A.E. Stallings
A.E. Stallings is the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Her publications include verse translations of Euripides and Lucretius, and five collections of poetry. Her most recent collection,
Like
, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Richard Sieburth
Editorial Reviews
“Simply delightful… Montgomery’s imaginative translation brings to life hunting scenes alien to most modern readers’ experiences and skillfully renders the aesthetics of the original Arabic verse.”
—
ArabLit
“[These poems] are an extraordinary and very beautiful insight . . . into continuity and tradition.”
—
New Lines Magazine
Customer Reviews
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