Victor Zikoor’s Interview
with
Catherine Evans Latta, author of Beirut Summer
Arab TV, Comcast Chanel 15, San Jose, recently interviewed Catherine Evans Latta about her book of poems Beirut Summer published by Kings Mountain Press. Ms. Latta lived in Cairo and Beirut from 1963 through 1976, taught at the American University of Beirut, wrote for The Daily Star and is a resident of the Peninsula. The poems are a series of powerfully disturbing and vivid images detailing the pains of people living under fire in Beirut. She has included poems that cover several wars from 1967 to the present. Written from a woman’s point of view, the poems provide insights into the torn lives of ordinary people.
During the interview, she said that while the events in the poems are told in the first person, they were not all her personal experience “…there is poetic license after all,” but all the people in the poems were friends and it is their experiences and stories, as well as her own, that she drew upon for the collection. One poem tells of the extreme penury of two maids who came from the camps to work for her. She remarked how many had broken lives: — the gardener who moved his family to live in a tent in the garden because it was safer than in his neighborhood; — the friend whose farm was burnt to the ground, but felt obliged to remain to show her commitment to her country; — or the mother whose child could only sleep to a cassette playing the call to prayer.
Latta let her imagination take flight to describe the psychological pain of war. In fact, she sat under fire in 1967, sat out the 1972 War and in 1974 while teaching at AUB had bombs going off in nearby class rooms. She was in Beirut during the beginning of the 1975-1990 Civil War and again in 1983.
Other Writers praise Beirut Summer:
Marilyn Yalom: A powerful and highly successful presentation.
Nancy Packer: “a lovely collection—so vivid and so moving [it]
will stick with me along time.”
Beirut Summer is available at Kepler’s Books, Menlo Park, Tel. 650 324-4321
and Books Inc, Town & Country, Palo Alto, Tel. 650 321-0600
by
Catherine Evans Latta
This volume of poems presents a powerful series of dramatic images of the violence in Lebanon as seen through the eyes of a woman. The most recent round of hostilities was in the summer of 2006. In fact, most fighting in Beirut has been in the summer—hence the title: Beirut Summer.
The poems were first published in the prestigious “Beloit Poetry Journal.” Because of their timeliness and relevance to the turbulent conditions throughout the Middle East, Kings Mountain Press has published them in a limited, hand sewn, signed and numbered edition of collector quality.
About the Author: Catherine Evans Latta graduated from Cornell University and the American University of Beirut. She studied at Stanford with poet Denise Levertov and author Nancy Packer. Catherine’s poetry has been published in numerous journals: The Beloit Poetry Journal, the Stanford Literary Quarterly, Fresh Hot Bread and elsewhere. A feature columnist for Beirut’s The Daily Star, the largest English language paper in the Middle East, she taught in the English Dept. of the American University of Beirut and resided in Cairo for three years and in Beirut for ten. She currently lives in Portola Valley, Ca. and Boothbay, Maine, the setting of a forthcoming series of short stories
