Mohamed Soliman is an original and significant voice in contemporary prose poetry, even though he started writing at the end of the 1960s, publishing a number of books including taf'ila poems.
In his collection of poems, Tahta Samaain Okhra (Under a Different Sky), Mohamed Soliman, Cairo: General Organisation for Cultural Palaces (Voices Series), 2003. pp85, he presents texts written in Cairo, Chicago and Iowa during the period 1995-97, the poems being full of allusions to Whitman, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg and others. "The postman did not come at Eid," Soliman writes, "carrying friends' faces. The postman did not come with his sack, did not stand clapping. The postman has turned into a screen, a machine searching the air like a detective. Perhaps the postman will not share my tea tomorrow.
He will not tell the neighbours that I have family and friends elsewhere, or a country.
Can machinery bear the colour of my joy and my longing?"
