The first collection of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems from across all periods of his life, highlighting the breadth, depth, and evolution of the beloved writer known as Palestine’s national poet
In this sumptuous, expansive new collection — featuring new translations, for the first time, into English of significant poems from the 1960s to 1980s — Mahmoud Darwish’s full scope as a poet, Palestinian, political asylee, and renderer of worlds is finally on full display.
Darwish’s poems have been scattered by the winds, the result of a life of exile spanning from Galilee to Paris to Beirut and Cairo and his eventual final destination: Houston, Texas. Never before have his works been so thoroughly assembled in one place, and so thoroughly refreshed via unseen translations, as in this collection, compiled and edited by writers, professors, and scholars of Palestine, Hannah Lillith Assadi and Omar Khalifah.
Darwish was a master of Arab poetics and modernist methods, and in combining these influences, he created poetry of intense beauty and resonant music, and is forever read and treasured around the Middle East as a source of comfort and pride. Even now, nearly two decades after his passing, he remains an icon: There is graffiti across the Middle East and in Palestine of lines of his poems, his face. In his verses, everyone who has ever been dispossessed or displaced found a voice that spoke to them. In Darwish’s poem, they found a home.
He was not solely a poet of resistance, however. Palestinians “cannot be defined by our relationship, positive or negative, to Israel. We have our own identity,” he told Raja Shehadeh in an early 2000s interview. Here, in these fifty spectacular poems, is a range of expression that proceeds from that identity: love poems, lyrics, observations of nature, epically structured myths, and his famous diaries of life under siege, of life looking at the stars.
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