Abdullah Al-Samati: The poet Asiya Al-Ammari walks outside the roses – Al-Hiwar Al-Jazaeryia

The critic Abdullah Al-Samati’s new critical book was recently published, entitled: “Manifestations of the Reader’s Imagination: Asiya Al-Ammari in Her Divan: Walking Outside the Roses.”

The book, published by Dar Al-Adham in Cairo in its first edition in May 2023, deals with the aesthetic and stylistic experience of the poetess in her fourth collection: “Walking Outside the Roses” through four chapters bearing the following titles: (The shock of receiving, the identity of words and the feat principle, she and roses and the poetics of conscience, techniques of poetic discourse).

Abdullah Al-Samati says in his book: In the poetry of Asiya Al-Ammari, the poem is manifested according to the contexts that it imposed on its writing, which are contexts that focus on intense condensation. The poet is the one who shapes the reader according to what she writes, and makes him prepare to receive extensive texts, focusing on the significance more than on detailing the poetic subject, and focusing on the result more than on proposing premises and reasons. Hence, this formation that the reader is exposed to puts him in a different area. Of the poetic performance and its components, and it is certainly an area that is not easy, and does not present everything to the recipient, but rather makes him stand on the edges of the semantic blades of the texts.

Poet Asiya Al-Ammari has published four collections: (Concerning Two Roses) (The Literary Club in Riyadh 2009), (Can an Abandoned Dress) / Dar Rawashen 2020 and (Salty Jar Songs) / Dar Rawashen 2020 and (You Walk Outside the Roses) / Dar Rawashen 2021 M

In this book, the focus is on the dimensions of the short structure in her poetry, through her collection: “She Walks Outside the Roses,” where she argues in these very short texts, a number of visions, that constitute a measure of the aesthetic tension that the texts intend.

Al-Samati believes that the ideal vision presented by the poetess always leads to anticipation and investigation, as it does not give us clips or small scenes that overlook the poetic event, but it gives us areas of thinking, contemplation and deliberation in experiencing its textual scenes. The texts are not completed voluntarily in a semantic form. A reader and a knowledgeable person must suffer, linking the texts to each other in semantic units that were written with perfection and accuracy. Hence, we are not very surprised by the inclusion of some specific titles that represent the centers of gravity in the Diwan, and we are also not surprised by the inclusion of certain repetitions in texts that stimulate to generate our questions.

For reference, the critic Abdullah Al-Samati has published more than 30 critical books, most notably: Spectra of Poetry, The Fabric of Creativity, The Critical Encyclopedia of Arabic Prose Poems, Senses of Femininity, and The Attractiveness of Feminist Poetry.