Review of the book ‘For Those Differing in the Mint of the Gaze’, the Poetry Collection of Libyan Poet Mohammed Al-Gaddafi
Salah El-Din Rashed | Libya
In his poetry collection ‘For Those Differing in the Mint of the Gaze’ (Li-Mukhtalifin fi Na‘na‘ al-Nazrah), poet Mohamed Gaddafi Masoud weaves an experience that transcends mere emotional outpouring; instead, he evokes nostalgia as a sharp, multifaceted essence, dissolving language within the crucible of an ardent consciousness that rejects stasis and defies fleeting contemplation. It is a text that surpasses the limits of direct verbal expression, compelling the reader to sense its profound dimensions, where linguistic simplicity coexists with deep semantic weight. Here, words open onto metaphors that permeate self, place, and time, reshaping perception—not as an act of retrieving the past, but as an act of manifestation and revelation—for the shifting scent of mint, in his vision, mirrors the very diversity of destinies.
The title itself—‘For Those Who Differ Regarding the Mint of Perspective’—is far from neutral; from the very first moment, it signals an aesthetic and existential question. How can we differ in our experience of scents—that sense most deeply intertwined with memory? Does mint, with its inherent coolness and freshness, transform within memory into a flavor fractured between pleasure and loss? Here, the title throws the door to interpretation wide open, turning the “mint” into a matter of differing angles of perception—touching upon the contours of childhood, the dampness of pain, and the images and shadows etched beneath the skin. The poet does not merely describe; rather, he places the reader before a sensory mirror where reflections multiply, shifting between the collective and the personal, while drawing from the depths of memory the wellsprings of its narratives—the very locus and source of his poetic tension.
In this text, memory does not represent a moment of naive recollection; rather, it is the structural framework from which images, metaphors, and fractures branch out. Here, memory grows like a living organism, breathing within the poems and weaving its way between voices and silence.
With a sigh more distant than a star—
Deep within me—
I craved the taste of the earth.
A poem brief in word count and meticulously distilled, yet charged with immense tension between cosmic expanse and inward enclosure. “With a sigh” marks not merely the onset of a feeling but a moment of internal explosion; “beyond a star” signifies a distance measurable only by pain and the unspeakable. Then comes the striking conclusion: “I craved the taste of the earth”—a closing line that transports us from the celestial heights to the primal earth, from yearning to escape, from the wound to the root. Here, the poet’s unique ability shines through: transforming language into an existential tool that derives its alphabet from the senses and elevates fragility to a supreme poetic value.
On another level, some texts adopt a contentious, confrontational stance, reclaiming the self as a battleground between an idea and its constraints, between possibility and deprivation, and between the urge for birth and the threat of symbolic death. Here, the poet realizes that a poem holds no ready-made ideas; rather, it contains visions forged from anxiety, shaped by confusion, and formed through resistance to the status quo—visions for which poets sometimes fight, even when they appear obscure, mad, or impossible. This conflict is not merely a philosophical approach but the very essence of the poetic act and a reflection of the poet’s struggle to infuse the text with meaning without sacrificing its evocative and symbolic nature.
O you, the strongest,
Free the womb of the idea from within you;
You keep it shackled in your chest.
Let it conceive your very opposite.
O you, the strongest,
Dismount from the steed of what you have forbidden.
Here, the conflict between the self and its reflection in the mirror of repression is embodied. “The womb of the idea” is a highly sensitive metaphor, uniting fertility with compulsion, and fullness with prohibition. As for the phrase “let it conceive your opposite,” it serves as a philosophical call to empower contradiction as a creative necessity; the poet here likely draws upon dialectical thought in its profoundest sense—where an idea only reaches completion by colliding with its antithesis, and creativity is born from the womb of conflict rather than the tranquility of settled meaning. Indeed, as the saying goes, “the meaning lies within the poet.” Thus, the call to “dismount” signifies not defeat, but the deconstruction of a symbol of false power and a rebellion against the hollow privileges that deny the self the discovery of its own inner freedom.
The style of poet Mohammed Gaddafi Masoud is grounded in a condensation that borders on distillation. He eschews sprawling sentences or diffuse imagery, relying instead on a spare vocabulary—one nonetheless saturated with flashes of insight and layers of meaning. His poetry is built not upon the expansiveness of speech, but upon the vastness of the silence between words. He writes as if painting with the boundaries of light, trading clamor for a whisper and ornamentation for the “fourth dimension” of meaning. Here, language opens onto the unseen, imagery onto vision, and the poem onto the unspeakable—a dimension of the silent poem residing within the poet’s own state of repression. In this context, the poems transform into vast spaces of contemplation and tension. I will not venture into a study of the poet that might never reach a conclusion; exploring these dimensions requires pausing to consider temporal and psychological aspects, and crossing from the material to the abstract—where the poet transcends the tangible to move toward symbols, dreams, and premonitions, and where reality dissolves into metaphor. It also entails addressing the existential-philosophical dimension of the hidden world the poet inhabits, alongside questions of being, death, identity, and absence. Not to mention the structural and artistic dimension—that profound aesthetic layer born of the accumulation of sounds, the subtle, harmonious, and subconscious rhythm between words, and the realm that lies beyond speech itself.
Most of the poet’s texts exemplify a highly precise form of poetic condensation. His ability to distill philosophical and emotional vision manifests in brief flashes that nonetheless expand to encompass profound existential and aesthetic significance. Here, this reduction is not a matter of deficiency but of semantic surplus; it is a linguistic stripping-away that preserves the essence of the poetic image while discarding superfluous expression. The language thus engages in a form of “expressive silence,” eschewing narrative and elaboration in favor of allusion and suggestion.
Who heals the wound of whiteness
With a darkness made of light?
The text opens with a question—yet one fraught with contradiction. In visual and poetic cultures, “whiteness” is typically associated with serenity, purity, and beginnings; how, then, can it sustain a wound?
This subversion of expectations opens up a horizon of interpretation, transforming whiteness into a metaphor for something fractured—be it a dream, purity, childhood, the act of writing, or memory itself. This poetic flash is more than just a line of verse; it is an evocative state that leaves the reader poised on the edge of an open-ended question, offering no ready-made answer. Therein lies its power: it creates a semantic void, inviting the reader to fill it with their own experiences, imagination, and reflections.
Despite the diverse influences evident in the poems of Mohamed Gaddafi Masoud, he avoids the trap of mere imitation. Instead, he harnesses these influences to forge a distinctive voice—one that is economical yet charged with meaning, and characterized by a unique duality. This voice stems not only from his poetic roots but also from a profound sensitivity to detail—an ability to distill the mundane into vibrant poetic scenes that resonate deeply without clamor.
Ultimately, ‘Li-Mukhtalifīn fī Na‘nā‘ al-Naẓrah’ (For Those Who Differ in the Mint of the Gaze) is not merely another collection added to the canon of Arabic poetry; it is a poetic manifesto of a self that perceives the world through its own pulse rather than through pre-set lenses. Mohamed Gaddafi Masoud does not write from the surface of events, but from the depths of bewilderment, the trenches of questioning, and the scars of memory. His poems stand as luminous testimonies to the tragedies of reality, yet they prioritize feeling over prosody, and life itself over mere ornamentation. The poems in this collection—‘For Those Who Differ in the Mint of the Gaze’—stand among the most significant poetic expressions of recent decades. They demonstrate that poetry remains capable of being an existential act rather than mere linguistic ornamentation, and of reawakening within us what had been numbed by certain poetic schools—schools that forgot that poetry, at its core, is an uncompromising pulse.
Read: A Handful of Pink Atoms
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Salah El-Din Rashed is a writer and critic from Libya
