A continuing exploration of the self

Poetry remains one of the arts most capable of approaching the unknown without ever fully surrendering it to explanation. A poet may come close to what he seeks, yet refuses the easy or familiar path towards it. This resistance is part of poetry’s power: language unsettles the reader, challenges expectation and opens ordinary experience to new meanings.

This idea provides a useful way into Abdullah al Balushi’s collection, The Enchanting Flutter of the Star.

Across seven long poems, Al Balushi repeatedly searches for the self through changing landscapes, memories and encounters with existence.

The seven poems — Yankat: The Speaking Root of the Sun, The Seduction of the Hill, The Child Within, The Enchantment of the Star, Footsteps of Nothingness, The Seduction of the Upper World and The Mysterious Code — may initially appear unrelated. Yet they are connected by one persistent concern: the poet’s attempt to understand a self that constantly changes in response to memory, place, pain and the surrounding world.

In the opening poem, Yankat: The Speaking Root of the Sun, place becomes inseparable from the self.

The poet recalls a luminous road, quiet birds and a sidr tree whose grief seems to remain unspoken:

“There, I called out along the shining road, where quiet birds stood lost in thought and somewhere below, a sidr tree released its sorrow in silence”.

These physical details lead back towards childhood, but childhood is not presented simply as nostalgia. It becomes an early stage in the poet’s uneasy relationship with existence. Houses, trees and landscapes appear familiar, yet they cannot entirely satisfy the self’s deeper thirst for meaning.

In The Seduction of the Hill, the landscape becomes even more active. Earth, trees, sunlight and water are not passive scenery but sources of endurance. The poet writes: “I learnt endurance from the earth, from the splendid crown of the tree and from the modest grace of being quenched”.

Nature becomes a teacher. The poet sees in it repeated forms of birth, survival and renewal, while the self continues to struggle with its own uncertainty.

The theme of childhood becomes central in The Child Within. Here, the poet returns to an earlier vision of the world in which the sun, rain, mountains, birds, flowers and shadows seemed charged with wonder. Childhood offers temporary protection from the harshness of the present.

The poet remembers: “In childhood, I marvelled at worlds imprisoned inside oval frames like mirrors, where beauty itself was sacred”. This return to childhood resembles the romantic poet’s retreat into nature, but Al Balushi uses it less as an escape than as a means of seeing reality differently. The child’s gaze allows him to recover simplicity, tenderness and a sense of unity with the universe.

In The Enchantment of the Star, night and light become carriers of memory. Sky, sea and stars create an atmosphere of intimacy and emotional security. The poet’s imagination gathers love, loss, warmth and loneliness into a series of natural images. The sea, especially, becomes a recurring stage on which human experience is reflected.

The collection then moves beyond personal memory towards dialogue with other poets. In Footsteps of Nothingness, Al Balushi addresses Arthur Rimbaud. Rather than simply paying tribute to him, he enters an imagined conversation with Rimbaud’s childhood, suffering and rebellion. Poetry here becomes a meeting place between two selves separated by time and geography.

A similar encounter occurs in The Seduction of the Upper World, dedicated to Fernando Pessoa. The individual self becomes less visible, replaced by a broader sense of shared human bewilderment. Earth and sky, pain and survival, belong not to one poet alone but to a collective human experience.

The final poem, The Mysterious Code, turns to Friedrich Hölderlin. Here, Al Balushi approaches the relationship between suffering and beauty. Pain is not merely destructive; it may also become the source from which artistic vision emerges. The poet’s dialogue with Hölderlin reflects a concern that runs through the entire collection: how can the self remain open to beauty when existence repeatedly wounds it? Nature provides one answer. The tree continues to offer shade, even when stripped bare. The stream still brings life, even when its water is clouded. These images embody persistence and give the poet a language through which to imagine survival.

The Enchanting Flutter of the Star is therefore less a collection of separate poems than a continuing exploration of the self. Childhood, landscape, memory, other poets and the natural world all become mirrors in which that self tries to recognise itself.

Al Balushi’s poetry does not offer easy conclusions. Its strength lies precisely in its restlessness: the self remains difficult to grasp, always shifting between the visible and invisible, pain and beauty, memory and the unknown.

Translated by Badr al Dhafri This is an adapted translation of the original Arabic article published in the print edition of Nizwa Magazine on October 30, 2023.