Moving amid the single voice which is lost in silence and the drunkenness of the word incarnate, amid the darkness of the night and the earliest lights of dawn, amongst metaphorical and real drinks and taverns, is this book, Vino (Wine), a measured, carefully served celebration of this happy or sad but always generous spirit, which man’s hands make blossom from bunches of grapes, from the vines which rise above the earth on the shoots of its stock. A hermetic celebration, as well, in nearly every meaning of this adjective.

Mohammed Bennis (Fez, 1948) is a poet, literary critic and professor of Arab Literature at the Université Mohammed V in Rabat. He has been the President of Morocco’s House of Poetry and is the Director of the Dâr Tûbkâl publishing firm. He took part in the journal Al-Thaqafa Al-Jadida (New Culture), whose ten-year life span marked a decade of literature and culture in Morocco. He has had thirteen books of poems published, several of which have been translated into French, English and Italian. El don del vacío (The Gift of Emptiness) (1993) was published in this same poetry collection in 2006, in a translation by Luis Miguel Cañada with a frontispiece by Antonio Gamoneda. As stated by Federico Arbós in his Foreword, “Mohammed Bennis is not just one of the greatest Moroccan poets of our day, but also a critical role model for the intellectual and cultural movements in his country as of the 1970’s.”