ABSTRACT
Salah Stetie by no means conceals the mystical postulates of his hermetic poetry. In the title poem of Cold Water Shielded, a generous bilingual selection from fifteen books published between 1973 and 1995, the Lebanese diplomat announces: "Of that which is written I know / Nothing / —Speech is drawn up in airlessness." The poet combines Sufistic as well as obsessive personal symbols in a paradoxical struggle to get beyond the self, rationality, knowledge, indeed symbolism, and attain the kind of purity described in one poem as akin to "a ladder of imagination returning / In joy to the wood of its intrinsicalness." Stétié composes interlacing sequences in which individual poems often exhibit sudden, surrealist-like, changes in perspective—the enjambments are masterful—as well as tantalizing tautologies and oxymorons. A characteristic phrase like "the unburned burning of the wind" illustrates how images that are not fully formed, as it were, reflect what might precede our all-too-human rationalizations of experience.
