Loss and Memory: The Exilic Nihilism of Wadī Saādah, Australia's Lebanese Émigré Poet

Wadī Saādah, poet of the new Lebanese Mahjar, writes the loss and alienation which have been salient features of the experience the generation who came of age in the early 1970s and witnessed the horrors of recent Lebanese history. In his inimitable prose-poetic style, he documents the existential vortex which draws him in, but from which his poems escape as exquisite flares shot from afar, illuminating for us brilliantly, briefly where he has gone, tracers of personal, generational, and historical dissolution.