Sapardi Djoko Damono, one of Indonesia's most productive and popular poets first began writing poetry as a high school student in the mid- 1950s. Before Dawn includes poems written by the author over a forty year time span, from 1961 to 2001. Arranged as they are in chronological order, the poems in Before Dawn together form a kind of poetic autobiography.
In "One Night," written in 1964, the author is a young Muslim boy crying outside the church door as his classmates celebrate Christmas. In the 1967 poem, "For my Wife," he is a young husband telling his wife that "the earth holds a...
Sapardi Djoko Damono, one of Indonesia's most productive and popular poets first began writing poetry as a high school student in the mid- 1950s. Befo...
