140 x 215mm, 169 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024

Through the poems of A Horse at the Door, taken from works published between 1985 and 2012, the Lebanese-Australian poet Wadih Saadeh allows himself to be known. Recounting his memories, his fears, and his attempts to assuage them, Saadeh treats the reader as a welcome companion with whom one can exchange dark jokes over arak and cigarettes. He addresses connection and its absence, continually applying permutations of friendship to both familiar and unexpected subjects, from the possibility of befriending passers-by to the clouds and their shadows, limbs and feet, and ourselves. As Youssef Rakha writes in the collection’s afterward, ‘The intensity and the intimacy is such that it feels like Saadeh is telling your life story, not his…’

Covering the many phases of Saadeh’s life, these poems return consistently to the liminal act of departure: his father’s departure in a tragic and painful death when Saadeh was fourteen; his own departure from various European cities as a young man yearning for arrival; the departure of contemporaries and families migrating away from war; and the departure of limbs from bodies on the battlefield. Saadeh does not only witness departure, but also what it leaves behind: ‘On the surface of the lake is a leaf. It was an eye. On the bank is a branch that was a rib. / I am trying to gather up the leaves and the branches. / I am trying to gather together someone whom I loved.’ He considers how one may live with the traces of the departed—and perhaps what it feels like to be such a trace, left behind in the wake of loss and flight.

This departure, too, becomes a friend, something familiar and beautiful. It becomes a kindness—permission to leave behind the horrors of being present in the world, with each other. ‘Is this why it is more important to befriend departing / than settling? / Is this why our lives must be no more than a rehearsal of / the beauty of departure?’ Stunningly wrought in English by Robin Moger, Saadeh’s poems are not satisfied with certainty, nor do they ask rhetorical questions. They ask for your dreams, your losses, your questions—as a friend might do.

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