Walid bitar biography of christopher
Walid Bitar was born in Beirut, Lebanon and immigrated to Canada with his family in He attended the University of Toronto before traveling and working in.!
Missionary Pastor of the ARABIC EVANGELICAL BAPTIST CHURCH OF OTTAWA.
Readers familiar with Lebanese-born and Toronto-based poet Walid Bitar will find few surprises in his most recent collection. Divide and Rule bears an especially strong resemblance to its immediate predecessor, The Empire’s Missing Links (a book I reviewed in Arc 62).
The similarities are thematic—power and its breakdown are preoccupations of Bitar’s—as well as formal: the poems in each book are set in quatrains and range from sixteen to thirty-six lines in length.
It isn’t just repetition that makes a comparison unfortunate.
As I said in my review of TEML, range is not a forte of Bitar’s; because his poems don’t vary much, it’s crucial that they be chosen judiciously for a collection. While D&R contains only forty-two poems printed on fifty-five pages of text—brief by contemporary publishing standards—it is nonetheless a good one-third longer than TEML (thirty poems and forty pages).
Coach House’s cover copy calls D&R’s pieces “dramatic monologues … ea