“From the embers of loss and death, from childhood and the moon, from villages and cemeteries and forests, geography and God, Khoury-Ghata has created a dazzling, soaring, thrilling imagination . . . Here There Was Once a Country is to poetry what One Hundred Years of Solitude is to fiction. Here is another world, another language, another dimension to reality, which will never again be the same.”

• Translator’s Preface • Widow • The Dead Man’s Monologue • The Seven Honeysuckle Sprigs of Wisdom • Early Childhood