The Hunt in Arabic Poetry: From Heroic to Lyric to Metapoetic by Jaroslav Stetkevych (review)

In the book entitled, The Hunt in Arabic Poetry: From Heroic to Lyric to Metapoetic, Jaroslav Stetkevych presents an intriguing synthesis of the history of Arabic hunt poetry, from the early Bedouin knightly and heroic ode called the qaṣῑdah, through a more distinctive freer lyric poem called the tardiyyah. Stetkevych pulls together the poetic threads from antiquity to the modern Arabic poetic and metapoetic hunt traditions, by using a simple organized tripartite structure with nine chapters. Seamlessly, Stetkevych offers an eclectic but much focused study that exemplifies several delicately constructed poems in which images of stylized medieval and modern hunt practices become graceful and elevated. In turn, each poetic interpretation reflects the "passion [felt by Stetkevych] for the qualitative distinctness of Arabic hunt poetry" itself, [especially] for what poetry did or is capable of doing for and with hunting" (2).

In the "Introduction," the reader can find comprehensive explanations of Arabic terms and literary poetic practices that Stetkevych uses to take one through Arabic poetic contributions. He begins with the qaṣῑdah-ode that reflects a hunter's sense of his heroic hunt experiences. As a meditative literary experience, Stetkevych shows how the shorter tardiyyah becomes a more lyrical, suitable, and impactful literary form for speaking to the long-held Arabic passion for the hunt. Stetkevych speaks to the confluence of the two modes as "contrapuntal grace" in their construction, lending credence to Stetkevych's own reasons for quantifying and qualifying each poem included in this book. While he acknowledges the esoteric nature of his work on individual poems, so too he encourages one to consider the intrinsic value in each chosen poem itself as speaking to a greater intangible human experience. Thereafter, Stetkevych makes the case for new scholarship and criticism in Arabic hunt poetry. By taking this approach, we can interlope to "live on in this new time, only now with its own burden as the meta-quarry of a meta-hunt, all in a meta-poem that is out of control" (5).

In Part I "The Heroic and the Anti-Heroic in the Early Arabic Ode: The Qaṣῑdah" substantiates the poetic form as "the matrix of the classical Arabic poetic tradition" that represents three structures "the nasīb (lyric-elegiac prelude), and the rahīl (desert journey), and the fakhr (self-exaltation) or madīl (encomium)" (5). Stetkevych compartmentalizes both the poetic themes and the Arabic hunting state of mind that underlie them. The first poems exemplify the more structured and determined themes that can seem quite formal and contrived for the subject of hunting. Stetkevych explains how "bounds may be formal, but even in their all-too apparent rigor they are not nontransgressive" (26). Moreover, as these poetic forms move somewhat fluidly from a more chivalric timbre to the more familiar allegorical premise, we come to delight in the many evolutionary poetic nuances. Stetkevych shows how the solitary poem enters new domains and "its transition from the formal and structural component […] to the shorter and above all freestanding hunt poem, the tardiyyah (35). We see the transformations in which the communal and social, cultural and ritual, serve as grounds for containment—and encapsulating the hunt becomes surreal and iconic. In the final chapter in this section, we see how complete and distant the hunt poem has become, namely a much freer, independent, and ultimately novel poetic genre called the tardiyyah. To this end, the first section helps us to understand the historic canonical trends that began in the pre-Islamic and ends in the mid-Umayyad periods.

The second part uses specific poems to focus on "The Hunt Poem as Lyric Genre in Classical Arabic Poetry: The Ṭardiyyah." Stetkevych examines the freestanding lyric using the exemplary works of Abū Nuwās, ʿAlī Ibn al-Jahm, Ibn al-Muʿtazz, and Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī. Initially, we are given the wherewithal to understand how...