From scenes in the prehistoric cave art of southwestern Europe to Hollywood's Alien vs. Predator series, the struggle between hunter and prey has entertained humankind from our earliest days. Mythic, political, or fantastic, stories about the hunt capture audiences of hunter-gatherers, nomads, agriculturalists, and urban industrialists alike. Arabic poetry is no exception. As The Hunt in Arabic Poetry demonstrates, hunting was an important topic from pre-Islamic times onwards, although the subject seems to have lost prominence after the Abbasid period. Hunters were either human or nonhuman. For the prey, the stakes could hardly have been higher: the aim of the hunt in these poems was not to capture and tame, but to kill.

The book consists of nine chapters, seven of which have been published previously as articles, the earliest in 1996, the latest in 2013. When collections of single-authored articles are assembled into monographs, the result is not always a coherent argument, which develops from one chapter to the next. In this book, however, we do have a high degree of coherence, which stems from the chronological sequence of the poems analyzed in the individual chapters, and so a narrative of evolution. (The sequence of original publications also mirrors the chronology of the analyzed poetry.)

The principal trajectory of that poetic evolution, discussed in Chapters 1–7, leads from a bifurcated representation of the hunt in the classical tripartite qaṣīda to the single-themed poem of the hunt (ṭardiyya) of the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. The final two chapters are devoted to modern Arabic poetry; Chapter 8 discusses poems by ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and Ahmad ʿAbd al-Muʿti Hijazi, Chapter 9 a poem by Muhammad ʿAfifi Matar. Here, the thematic complex of the hunt, of persecution and flight, is adapted creatively to the radically different circumstances of modern life.

The transformation of poetic representations of the hunt from the qaṣīda to the ṭardiyya forms the backbone of the bulk of this account. In the qaṣīda, the hunting theme is present in the second part, the raḥīl (the journey through the desert), when the poet appears as the “wretched hunter” who hunts on foot and for subsistence. The protagonist here, however, is the animal he chases. Following the raḥīl conventions of form, mood, and narrative, we can assume that since the animal, typically a stock character of the “animal panels” of the raḥīl, also stands for the poet's mount, the prey has to survive and the hunter has to be unsuccessful. An altogether different hunt emerges in the third and final part of the qaṣīda, whether fakhr or madīḥ. In either conclusion, the protagonist is the heroic and successful hunter whom Stetkevych classifies as “chivalrous” since he hunts on horseback. The technical contrast between the two forms of hunting is reflected in Arabic terminology: while ṣayd or qanṣ is used for the type of hunt evoked in the raḥīl, the chivalrous hunt of the third part is referred to as ṭard.

This terminology substantiates Stetkevych's argument that the courtly setting and the hunt on horseback were critical for the association between the third section of the qaṣīda and the all-dominating hunting theme of the later ṭardiyya. While both types, wretched and chivalrous hunter, had a semiotic legacy, the former became a poacher and disappeared. For most of the study, the author effectively traces some of these semiotic and structural transformations. He points out, for example, that in a poem by the Umayyad al-Shamardal, the hunt was clearly of the chivalrous kind, but the horse is not mentioned a single time (p. 55). Abu Nuwas stands “in the creative epicenter of the genre-emergence of the ṭardiyyah” (p. 128), while Ibn al-Muʿtazz “realizes the full lyrical potential of the Arabic hunt poem and moves beyond the mere objective description to lyrical affect” (p. 139). After the genre has seen a shift to the descriptive, Abu Firas al-Ḥamdani's choice of urjūza muzdawija meant a one-off experiment in narrative.

As with any other publication, readers should know what to expect from this book. Stetkevych assumes familiarity with and acceptance of his approach to Arabic poetry, which is in part anthropological. His interpretations are also marked by a formalist inflection of the principle that essence lies in origins.

In practice, the former means that the qaṣīda is read as a rite of passage. To some extent, this makes good sense. The image of the young hunter setting out for his first hunt and returning with meat is a common pattern in human history. The chivalrous hunter of the third part, however, presents a problem once hunting is understood as a significant social and political ritual. The wretched hunter for subsistence and the chivalrous hunter are several social strata apart. (A fuller discussion of Stetkevych's approach, which takes aspects of anthropology and of social and political history into consideration, might be the subject for future research.)

The formalist perspective means that poems are commonly interpreted against the backdrop of the evolution of the qaṣīda and its three parts. Analyses are based on assumptions of associations of moods and themes, of original purposes of raḥīl or madīḥ compared to which post-qaṣīda poems appear first and foremost as reworkings. Stetkevych thus attributes to the ṭardiyya “a heightened form-consciousness” and the need to establish validity principally in terms of the poetic tradition (p. 2). The reader needs to look elsewhere for explanations of this principle and why, for example, Stetkevych's explorations of form, imagery, and the poet's position within the hunt should be read with reference to earlier poetic traditions rather than independently.

Stetkevych identifies his approach explicitly as text-centric and consequently does not explore the question of to what extent audiences would have been aware of the earlier poetic tradition and so made the associations that Stetkevych imputes. The reader's contribution to a poem's meaning is therefore downplayed, even dismissed, although this does not appear to affect Stetkevych's own role in interpreting the poems.

What readers should not expect is a study that contributes to the cultural history of the hunt. Stetkevych is quite explicit in his analytical priorities, his “passion” being “mainly for what poetry did or is capable of doing for and with hunting” (p. 2). He includes very few references to social history; indeed, he is somewhat dismissive of social history in the introduction, where he appears to acknowledge that the selection of poetry may have been occasionally “compromised by extra-poetic decisions, for example, those of mere social history” (p. 3), occasions which he does not want to disguise. As a reason for such compromise, he mentions “to fill in an extra-literary vacuum of cold information” (p. 3). If there is anything but a rhetorical and polemical purpose in creating such a contrast between “passionate” literary analysis and “cold” social history, the present reviewer fails to recognize it.

That the shift from two-part hunt to ṭardiyya is consistent with any number of social and political transformations is easy enough to imagine and indeed finds confirmation in other studies such as Thomas Allsen's The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). It is here, too, that particularly promising opportunities for future research become obvious. To mention but one example, the chapter on Abu Nuwas and the Abbasid ṭardiyya has the title “The Discreet Pleasures of the Courtly Hunt.” The “discreet” nature of the hunter lies, according to Stetkevych, in the hunter and poet's almost invisible persona: “rather than being the foregrounded agent of the hunt, the ʿAbbāsid hunter abstracts himself almost wholly from his own effective and affective centrality in the hunt” (p. 93). In this representation of the ṭardiyya, the hunting animals, i.e., falcon and dog, take center stage and the poet's role is to describe them rather than his own activity. What greater contrast could there be between this “discreet” courtly hunter and Allsen's royal hunter who enacts his claim for cosmological, political, and cultural significance in a hunt of such large scale that it was impossible to miss? Of course, the historian and the scholar of Arabic poetry need not tell the same story. The tension between the two accounts should rather be an occasion for further study of the social, cultural, and political functions of ritual and poetry, of patrons and audiences, and of just how much social reality the poems capture. The “wretched hunter,” for instance, may have disappeared in the ṭardiyya and he may not figure in the royal hunt either, but that does not mean that subsistence hunting ceased.

Likewise, and as is obvious from Stetkevych's bibliography, a fair amount of scholarship exists concerning other literary productions around the hunt, mainly the so-called “technical treatises.” These texts deal with issues of training and hunting, but are also much concerned with the health and care of birds of prey and other hunting animals and thus not primarily with the activity of hunting itself. Stetkevych mentions these treatises a few times in passing without being specific about their contents or circumstances of production. A closer inspection yields relevant results. In his discussion of the origins of falconry and poetry about falconry, for instance, the author refers to an anecdote cited by al-Damiri (d. 808) in his book on animals. The story identifies the Byzantine court as the setting where falconry was first practiced and does not speak of Arabian origins (p. 56). The most prominent of the medieval Arabic technical treatises, however, a book often referred to as “Adham-Ghitrif work” that dates to the early Abbasid or even late Umayyad period, presents a series of anecdotes about the origins of the practice of hunting with birds of prey. In this compilation, Byzantines stand alongside Persians as well as Arabs and Turks. (The compiler associates the different rulers with different kinds of birds. In Stetkevych's study such ornithological differences are not made and birds of prey are variably referred to as falcons, hawks, or even eagles.)

Another area for future research of some promise concerns the period that falls between Chapters 7 and 8 in the present book. Stetkevych ends his main selection with a short section on Kushajim whose death falls in the third quarter of the 10th century. Having observed earlier that “it is a melancholy sight to observe a lyrical genre such as the ṭardiyyah agonize and die as joy in the courtly hunt itself died” (p. 4), Stetkevych then attributes this development to the fact that “the ṭardiyyah found itself ever more strongly enmeshed in trends that were urbanizing, mercantile, and socially bourgeois-like” (p. 203). The choice of words here is infelicitous as in a few other references to social and political history. If this is the “cold information” of social history, it will be too vague for many of those primarily concerned with social and material approaches to the past. Upon consideration of other academic publications, the implication of a parallel decline of practice and poetry might be hard to maintain. (Historians of hunting may also want to know that the correct reference to ʿAbd al-Ḥamid al-Katib's Risala fi Wasf al-Sayd is Jamharat Rasaʾil al-ʿArab fi ʿUsur al-ʿArabiyya al-Zahira, vol. 2, al-ʿAsr al-Umawi, ed. Ahmad Zaki Safwat [Cairo, 1937], 544–48.)

While those who are already acquainted with Stetkevych's work will welcome this publication as a convenient access point to the scholar's publications on the subject of the hunt in Arabic poetry, those without such prior familiarity might find their reading experience frustrating. Given that the articles were revised for republication, it would have been easy to rework them in such a way as to make them accessible to a wider readership. What emerges as a main thesis of the book, for example, the formal evolution from qaṣīda to ṭardiyya, is presented a number of times. Some of these repetitions could have been replaced by a few introductory comments about Stetkevych's approach as well as more detailed explanations about the nature of his sources and the extent to which the poems he focuses on are representative of larger bodies of literature. There are, to be sure, occasional references to poems as breaking with principles of their contemporaneous poetic canon, but more detail would have been needed for outsiders.

While it would be unreasonable to fault an aesthetic and literary study for failing to use history as its main analytical framework, a few steps could have been made to bridge the gap to readers from different disciplines. As Allsen has demonstrated, although the hunt was a practice of some importance in medieval Eurasia, it has remained underresearched. The present study helps to reconstruct the development of this important phenomenon in human history and so understand and appreciate its cultural, social, and psychological effects.