Five Pakistanis featured in World Poetry Tree — an anthology of love, hope and peace

For the first time, an anthology of poetry of more than 400 leading poets from across the world was gathered and compiled in the form of a book. It was launched at the Dubai Expo 2020.

The e-book launch took place at Dubai Expo 2020, with five Pakistanis — Jameela Nishat, Fazil Jamili, Shahid Abbas, Shadab Hashmi, and Adeeba Shahid Talukder — having the honour of being included in it.

Jamili's poem is written about trees and the sad tales when they are cut down.

He is renowned poet and journalist, known for ‘Ghazal’, which is steeped in the classical tradition, and ‘Nazar’, which encompasses both existential and universal issues.

He actively participates in journalists’ rights movements and was recently re-elected the president of the Karachi Press Club.

Jamili is the author of ‘Gumnam Aadmi Ka Bayan’ (Unknown Person's Narrative), a poetry collection published in 2017.

A statement said Pakistanis are among the 400 poets — some of whom are nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature, directors of international poetry festivals, supervisors of pages, magazines, and poetry sites in all continents — who present their poems for the meanings of hope, love and peace in a post-pandemic world.

The initiative aims to record the presence of global poetry in all world expos, starting with the Dubai Expo 2020, the statement said.

There will be other copies of the World Poetry Tree that will be issued from the upcoming Expos in Osaka, Japan, in the year 2025 and beyond. As the Dubai Expo presents leading singers, artists and performers from all over the world, this E-book will add poets to the mix, to be in the heart of the world’s largest events and to gather the global poetry voices in one song, it said.

The World Poetry Tree is created and presented by poet Adel Khozam, one of the most prominent poetic names in the Emirates, who has published 15 books in poetry, novels, philosophy, and more. He has recently won the Tulliola International Prize for Poetry from Italy.

Khozam, in the statement said the World Poetry Tree consists of 12 branches, each branch bearing an independent title and a special colour design, and each branch includes about 32 poets from around the world, distributed according to the topics of their poems, creating a state of harmony in the distribution of paragraphs and chapters of the anthology.

These poems come together with the voices of poets from all over the world to celebrate the values of love, hope and peace, the poet said.

“They are communicated through this digital anthology at an important time and history of humanity, that is the return of life to normal after the COVID-19 pandemic shook the world and imposed isolation on people and distanced them from each other.”