The aesthetics of the closed and open place in the Poetry of Maad Jabouri

Spatial experience in the contemporary poetry is an outlet of the poetic expression. The significance of place as one of the essential elements of contemporary poetry stems from poetic visualizations or the presence of space in a poetic space dominated by a poetic imagination that makes the poetic space equivalent to the special elements in the poetic experience of the poet. This study aimed to investigate the presence of closed and open spaces in the poetry of Jabour Al-Jabouri and reveal the consequence of these features in his poetry. It employed a descriptive- analytic approach. The research used semiotic tools to analyze samples of this poet’s works. The research found that the place is one of the most important formal components of Jabouri’s poetry and renders the closed spatial symbols equivalent to Iraqi’s deteriorating reality or makes them representative of contemporary Iraq. It shows that jabouri was aware of sufferings under the oppression of the American authorities.  The open space at Al-Jabouri is associated with symbols such as the sea and the desert and is used by the poet at times to embody a life that is full of euphoria, warmth and life in the context of communication between men and women and sometimes represents life that is not lived because of the absence of communication between the two genders due to the dominance of male.  What draws the attention of the audience to the artistic presence of the place in the poetry of Jabouri is the strong presence of historical and religious narratives in the poetic text, where he employs some spatial and historical spatial references to create a poetic representation of the reality of contemporary Iraqi, characterized by silence and suffocation as we observe in his employment of the cave imagery, which was used by bleak images to reflect the weakness of the will of the Arab peoples and their submission to authoritarian oppression.