The Village Book

The diwan is a contemporary poetic epic about the poet's village, its nature, atmosphere, seasons, climate, and history. And because the poet possesses a long-standing history of impressions regarding his village, he conveys all of that to us through a bundle of intimate, quickly accessible, and astonishing signals, making us drawn to his images and fantasies with a thread of pure magic. Briefly, the Nile and the Euphrates: Those images that Abdul Aziz Al-Maqaleh paints of his village with the fingers of a poet, pouring the images into poems, lines whose colors are the village, and their meanings and letters are lines that embody its landmarks. Visions shift with them to see it with the eye of imagination emanating from the depths of meanings. And this spot "has been sitting like this for a while, in the innocence of a child, on the roof's shoulder, washing its eyelids in the morning with the water of the day, and its feet bathing in a small river that stirs when summer comes, and floods rage in the mountains, never retreating from the slope, welcoming the sun joyfully, and teasing all seasons. And at night, it kindles its dreams with firewood for remembrance before sleep..." This small village, located between the earth and the sky, in expanses of splendor, open to wide valleys, is the gateway to "Wadi Bana," famous in records and in sung poems. This is how Abdul Aziz Al-Maqaleh's village is, and these are some of its meanings and images, and his sensitivity. This is a painting through which he draws the shelter of his heart, which is one of thirty-seven paintings in his village’s art studio.