Dr Al-Zubeidy brings an insider's knowledge and an outsider's eye to one of the key issues in Anglo-American poetry: the transformative aspects of change based on science and technology, its relentlessness and its disruptive tendencies. As a poet and a survivor of an ongoing conflict that has seen the death of hundreds of thousands of his fellow Iraqis, AL-Zubeidy is aware of the effrontery of poetry in the face of modern horror such as the two world wars, the atomic bomb and later the shattering of old secular faiths and the re emergence of vehement religious strife and persecution with terror and fear as key combat components. Like Auden, Spender, MacNeice, Richard Wilbur, Randall Jarrell and Robert Haas.