Ahmed
Morsi is a renowned painter as well as a prolific art critic, journalist,
translator, and, as this book reveals to a new audience, a consummate poet,
with his debut collection published at the age of 19. Poems of Alexandria and New York, Ahmed Morsi’s first volume in
English translation, captures the modernity and empathy at the heart of all his
works, his surrealistic humour, and his visions of the dramas of ordinary life.
It comprises two of his best known collections, Pictures from the New York Album and Elegies to the Mediterranean, both written when he resumed writing
poetry following a break of nearly 30 years after the calamitous Arab defeat in
the 1967 Six-Day War. The former opens up the city of New York, his home since
the mid-1970s and where he still lives and works, while the latter takes
readers deep into abiding memories of the Mediterranean city of his birth,
Alexandria, Egypt.