The Story around the Corner: Nye's Interest in Minor Details of Everyday Life As an Essential Aspect of Her Poetry

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Dr. Mohammad Sayed Abdel-Moneim Sharaf is a lecturer in the English Department, Faculty of Arts, Zagazig University

Abstract

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian American poet, novelist, short story writer, songwriter, editor, and discographer. Browsing through Nye's poems, one cannot help taking notice of a recurrent aspect that permeates her poems, namely zooming in on insignificant details of everyday life and presenting them in a new, hence, serious light. The present paper, therefore, aims at highlighting this remarkable aspect of Nye's poetry first by documenting it through her views and opinions expressed in some of her interviews, essays, and other prose writings, not to mention few of her poems in which she voices these views and opinions forthrightly, together with the views and opinions of various critics and scholars and then by tracing it through her poetry.