Alumnus Omar Sabbagh (1999, PPE) to publish new poetry collection Gazan Days

Exeter College alumnus Omar Sabbagh (1999, PPE) is set to publish a new poetry collection, Gazan Days (Dar Nelson, 2025), offering a searing meditation on grief, war, and resistance. Written from his home in Beirut and deeply informed by the ongoing devastation in Gaza, the collection brings together the political and the personal in a series of urgent, unflinching poems. 

Sabbagh, whose previous work has appeared in Acumen, Morning Star, and New Humanist, writes from a dual perspective: both as witness and as neighbour. In Gazan Days, he explores the traumas of exile, parenthood, and historical memory with a lyrical intensity that draws on his own lived experience. 

The collections titular poem “Gazan Days,” opens with: 

Try as you might to be in their shoes, 
you’ll never quite see it, I fear… 

The poem continues to evoke the impossibility of fully grasping another’s suffering, even as it attempts to do just that. With imagery that moves between stars, cities, and war-torn streets, it closes with a haunting reflection on the lies we tell to comfort our children. 

Omar Sabbagh is currently based in Beirut and is the author of several poetry collections and critical works. Gazan Days will be available in June from Dar Nelson. 

The Titular poem “Gazan Days” is reproduced below, with kind permission.

Gazan Days

Beirut

Try as you might to be in their shoes,

you’ll never quite see it, I fear.  You,

who have passed through the staggering

of so much loss and so much losing, you,

whose sadness was forged into a proverb,

rendered a hackneyed phrase shared by a multitude,

you, for whom the common sense became

a more private one, tossing and shrieking

in the prisms and fires of your madness – no:

you will never quite understand it,

though you’ve tried.  Because on the inside

of all that spearing pain, there just are no words

left for speech, even to mistake.  And the snugness of the home

of letters within which you live so well’s no

more a haven, a dock, or berth.  Because hell

has come to earth, landed, kissing them its finished kiss,

and as its lips park upon the brow of those who are urgent, landless –

the eyes beneath can’t but scan a world for the light

that might just help them fathom a touch the color

and shape of things.  But the horror of it is, the sheer horror,

even with the boon of sight, the world they live would still

break the law and sunder the seeming of all you might

imagine – as Gazan days are whittled-away, and Gazan nights

turn and brim, the finished wheel of their time and space.

And at night, sometimes I look towards the stars

and recollect the lie we tell our daughter:

that when you die you become a star.

By Omar Sabbagh, 19/04/2025

The front cover of ‘Gazan Days’ by Omar Sabbagh