خلاصه ماشینی:
Pens, Swords, and the Springs of Art deals with a type of poetry competition held mostly at weddings of Israeli Arabs in Galilee (northern Israel), and Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine commemorates Palestinian refugees, victims of warfare and massacres in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank.
The second part, a second edition of a book of poems published after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, presents poems that are similar in content to the first part: the sufferings of Palestinians, especially refugees, in Lebanon who are caught in the cross-fire either between terrorist groups and Israeli forces or among mutually hostile groups inside Lebanon.
A recurrent theme is the heartrending suffering of inno- cents everywhere (especially in the first part), and specifically the tragic sit- uation of the Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon (in both parts), whose sad state is the result of regional battles for territorial control, power struggles among organizations with conflicting national or religious identi- ties, and blood feuds.
The book contains an appendix on classical Arabic duel poetry texts by such poets as ‘Imru al-Qays and `Abid ibn al-Abras as well as Abu Nuwas 90 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 26:1 and `Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf (without an English translation), an index of the names and terms appearing in the book (with references), and a list of books on Arabic poetry and literature published in the Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures.