The poems in this collection, Miyhar of Damascus, His Songs (Aghânî Mihyâr al-dimashqî,) established a new direction in Arabic poetry, comparable to that series of breaks with traditional styles we find elsewhere at early moments in the history of modernisms: Mallarmé or Apollinaire in France, Ezra Pound in the Anglophone world, Ungaretti in Italy, Sikelianos or Seferis in Greece. Adonis's early poems in traditional metrics demonstrate his mastery of the recurring rhythms and monorhyme: but Mihyar shattered that. The authoritative aesthetic break carried out in this book is a break from within. After Mihyar in 1961 there would be many additional leaps into experimental new forms: Mufrad bi-sîghat al jam' (Singular in plural form, 1977), for instance, in which words are scattered across the page in the manner of Mallarmé's Un coup de dés, generating a pictorial force no less powerful than their sound, or most recently Al-Kitâb (The book, 1995), in which multiple voices combine surprisingly. Al-Kitâb takes the form of a poem in the center of the page, flanked by marginal comments on it by fictional critics, going down the page in dialogue. Al-Kitâb may be Adonis's most striking recent creation, but the poems of Mihyar constitute the initial, definitive disruption.