Andalus

The idea of Moorish Spain captures the modern imagination, with its tales of knowledge shared across the borders of medieval Islam and Christendom, and of courts resounding to the gentle oriental strains of lute and ney. Yet it is an elusive place, glimpsed in the haunted emptiness of the Alhambra's gilded halls or amidst the pillars of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. This collection of its poetry, in a sparkling new translation by T. J. Gorton, fills those deserted spaces with the Moorish lust for life, and with a near-suffocating desire for love and for the rich enchantments of wine, laughter, moonlit picnics, and bare flesh.