Stone Bird
In Stone Bird, Poems of Exile, David Anthony Sam imagines a contemporary Syrian exiled from the civil war but also from all he has known, finding a safer place but not a welcoming one in the United States. Behind the collection lies the diaspora from the Syrian Civil War and the Arab emigration of the last 150 years, including the ghost of Sam’s Syrian grandfather who immigrated to America a century ago and did not find the streets paved with gold. Finally, these poems speak to the more universal experience of “exile” as part of the human condition.
Stone Bird is a book of exile and abandonment: physical, emotional, and geographical. In this collection of poems, David Anthony Sam draws on his Syrian ancestry and presents a world filled with “echoes of beggars’ cries / and wails of the muezzins, and images / from barren olive groves and vineyards / empty of any fruit, bleak of any leaf.” It is a deserted landscape which he paints, a landscape which reflects the inner loss he tries to come to terms with – of faith, of identity and, ultimately, of love. The poems are filled with images of the desert, of simooms, of cities long forgotten and of people struggling to reclaim their identity. And throughout it all, the stone bird stands in mute silence, so ossified that “should a jinni / animate his rock, / he still would not fly.” Sam’s poems speak to the heart and illuminate the soul. Mike Maggio's latest collection, Let's Call It Paradise, was released in 2022.
I have read poems and other genres of books about exile. But I have been fortunate to feel at home most everywhere I have ever been - except in the exile of marriage. Not until I read this collection of poems by David Anthony Sam did I realize all these years it had been lurking around every corner trying to banish me. Nathan M. Richardson; Poet, author and Frederick Douglass Historian
With beautiful language, imaginings and truths, Stone Birds is a haunting tale of exile. Sam’s compilations of Syrian ancestral memories ache with ambivalence, bringing to mind such celebrities as Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, who defected to the United States but eventually moved back to the USSR. Sam maintains the metaphor of a stone bird paired with dry dessert in such elegant descriptions as “…and my breath dust/blown by a wind/that laughs from my lungs.” All is not despair. In eloquent use of paradox, Sam offers uplifting introspection in “The Exile’s Equinox”: “Perhaps he is wholly enough./Perhaps he is profane enough./Perhaps the distance he has come/is the profoundest of his faiths.” Terry Cox-Joseph, artist and poet, author of Between Then and Now, Finishing Line Press, 2018.