A collection of poems about nature and power
To Ibn al-Muʿtazz and his Abbasid contemporaries, the hunt was more than a diversion—it was the theater for their poetic and political endeavors, captured here in fifty-nine Arabic hunting poems, or ṭardiyyāt. The poems of In Deadly Embrace describe hunting expeditions with animals trained to hunt, including saluki hounds and birds of prey. Many were composed after these outings, when the hunting party gathered to enjoy the game they caught.
Poetry was central to Abbasid society and served as a method of maintaining networks of patronage and friendship; the poems in this collection reflect these power dynamics and allowed Ibn al-Muʿtazz—prince of the realm and in line for the caliphate—to explore his own relationship to social and political power and to demonstrate his fitness to rule.
Ibn al-Muʿtazz was an influential poet and literary theorist of the Modernist school of poetry. In Deadly Embrace merges the Modernists’ new techniques and styles with age-old themes: military prowess and wisdom, fitness to rule and comradeship, the camaraderie of the hunt and the cult of heroic masculinity. Groundbreaking and evocative, the poems paint vivid pictures of hunting scenes while posing deep questions about our attentiveness to the natural world and the relationship of the human to the nonhuman.
A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

"Ibn al-Mu’tazz’s tardiyyat are . . . simply delightful. Meditations on starlit early-morning departures accompany adoring descriptions of the non-human members of the hunting party: swift dogs race arrows shot from lithe bows, elegant steeds carry their riders without fatigue, and raptors attack ruthlessly from the air. Montgomery’s imaginative translation brings to life hunting scenes alien to most modern readers’ experiences and skillfully renders the aesthetics of the original Arabic verse." - ArabLit

"[These poems] are an extraordinary and very beautiful insight . . . into continuity and tradition." - New Lines Magazine