This is Beirut-born Canadian immigrant Walid Bitar’s third collection of poetry, and was described by the Midwest Book Review as ‘a hybrid cross between raw emotion, vibrant energy, caustic wit, and painful revelation.’ Ezra Pound famously defined literature as ‘news that stays news’ - and Bastardi Puri, which launches from the political and aspires to the universal, is just that sort of news.
Walid Bitar’s poems read as if transmitted in softly staccato impulses from some remote time-warp in the tenth dimension. They crackle with the static of unique ciphers hurled over huge distances and we don’t know at first whether they are entreaties or imprecations. Certain poems threaten, others cajole; all buzz with an energy of language that sometimes splits open the husks of their forms. Weird images and weirder personages perch upon his stanzas, not only Rhodesian Ridgebacks in constitutional snits, Actaeons ogling Diana’s physique, and Tarzan in quicksand but the poet himself, weirdest of all, whose remarkable voice plots constellations and libels the starry nights. To read Bitar is to take a round-trip ticket on the Drunken Boat. His unusual and distinctive voice is by turns caustic and capricious, attuned to ‘rain and its minions’ but also painfully aware that ‘to whip is human, to be whipped divine.’ Best of all, like a speechless man suddenly given language, ‘this ambassador from El Dorado’ frolics and cavorts in his ‘underground patois’ with startling originality and mischievous flair. This is a book of poems torn between the comic and the inconsolable, now ‘surrendering to polkas in some smoky dive’ but also, and at the same time, ‘Eternity’s pied-à-terre.’